Jensen Huang lost the top job at the most valuable company on earth this week over two alleged affairs. He built Nvidia over 33 years. It took four days from the board opening an investigation to his resignation.
He is not the first billionaire to learn that money cannot buy discretion. When the richest people on the planet get their love lives wrong, the bill arrives in court, in the market, or in the divorce settlement — and the numbers are always enormous. Here are twelve of them.
Jensen Huang — the one that ended a 33-year reign
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, turning a graphics-chip company into the centre of the artificial intelligence boom. This week, it ended over two alleged affairs.
The first was reported to be with a former executive at a Singapore company, a woman US intelligence officials reportedly identified as a Chinese intelligence asset suspected of passing information to Beijing. The second was reported to be with a senior Nvidia executive who reported directly to him. The board opened an independent investigation on 8 November. Huang resigned on 12 November. The company gave no reason. The shares lost more than $1 trillion in a week.
Jeff Bezos — the $38 billion divorce
Jeff Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott for 25 years. They built Amazon together from a garage. In January 2019, they announced their divorce. Within hours, a tabloid published an exposé alleging Bezos was having an affair with television presenter Lauren Sánchez, and printed intimate text messages between them.
Bezos accused the tabloid’s parent company of trying to blackmail him with explicit photographs, and published the threatening emails himself. The divorce was finalised in April 2019. MacKenzie received about a quarter of their Amazon shares, worth around $38 billion at the time — the largest divorce settlement in history. She has since given away more than $19 billion of it. Bezos married Sánchez in June 2025, in a three-day wedding in Venice.
Bill Gates — the affairs he admitted, and the friendship that ended a marriage
Bill and Melinda Gates were married for 27 years and ran the world’s biggest private foundation together. When they announced their divorce in May 2021, they said only that they could no longer grow together.
The details came out in pieces. His spokesperson confirmed he had an affair with a Microsoft employee almost 20 years earlier, a relationship the company’s board had investigated. Then, in 2026, Gates admitted at a staff town hall that he had two extramarital affairs — one with a Russian bridge player, one with a Russian nuclear physicist.
The other factor was his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Gates met Epstein in 2011, years after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor, and kept meeting him until 2014. Melinda later called Epstein “evil personified” and said the association was connected to the divorce. Epstein’s own emails made further allegations about Gates, which his representatives called “absolutely absurd and completely false”.
Elon Musk — 14 children, four mothers, no rulebook
No billionaire has a love life quite like Elon Musk’s. He has been married three times to two women: Canadian author Justine Wilson, his first wife and the mother of six of his children, and British actress Talulah Riley, whom he married twice.
Then came the overlapping chapters. He dated actress Amber Heard on and off between 2016 and 2018. He began a relationship with musician Grimes in 2018; they had three children together. In November 2021, while Grimes was expecting their second child through a surrogate, Musk had twins with Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive — a fact that only emerged from court documents the following year. They have since had two more children together. In February 2025, author Ashley St. Clair announced she had a child with Musk.
The count, as of 2026: 14 known children, four mothers. Musk has never been accused of hiding any of it. He simply never bothered with the conventional version.
Tiger Woods — the crash that exposed everything
Tiger Woods was the most famous athlete on the planet and the first athlete to pass $1 billion in career earnings. In November 2009, a tabloid alleged he was having an affair with a New York nightclub hostess. Days later, he crashed his car outside his Florida home in the middle of the night. The crash turned a tabloid story into a global scandal.
More women came forward. On 11 December 2009, Woods admitted he had cheated. He took a break from golf, apologised in public in February 2010, and divorced his wife Elin Nordegren that August. The divorce settlement was reported at around $100 million. Sponsors including Accenture, Gatorade, Gillette and AT&T walked away, and the scandal was estimated to have cost him around $50 million in lost income. Nike stayed. He won the Masters again in 2019, but the clean-cut image never came back.
Rupert Murdoch — five weddings, four divorces
Rupert Murdoch has been married five times and divorced four. His second marriage, to Anna Torv, lasted 32 years and ended in 1999 with a settlement of $1.2 billion in assets — one of the largest divorce settlements of its time.
Seventeen days later, he married Wendi Deng. That marriage ended in 2013, reportedly after he discovered intimate emails between Deng and former British prime minister Tony Blair, a close family friend.
In 2016, at 85, he married supermodel Jerry Hall. Six years later, the marriage reportedly ended with an email. Hall filed for divorce, and it was finalised within two months. In June 2024, at 93, Murdoch married for a fifth time, to retired molecular biologist Elena Zhukova, 26 years his junior.
Harold Hamm — the $975 million cheque
Harold Hamm built Continental Resources from a one-man oil company into one of America’s biggest independent oil producers. He married Sue Ann Arnall, a lawyer and economist who worked at the company, in 1988. After more than two decades of marriage, she filed for divorce in 2012, and later alleged he had been unfaithful.
There was no prenuptial agreement, and Continental’s value had soared during the marriage — at one point, half of Hamm’s estimated $20 billion fortune was on the line. In November 2014, an Oklahoma judge ordered him to pay her $995.5 million in cash and assets. Two months later, Hamm wrote her a personal cheque for exactly $974,790,317.77. She first refused it, afraid that cashing it would kill her appeal for more, then deposited it days later. In April 2015, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that cashing the cheque ended her appeal. She kept the money. He kept control of Continental.
It remains one of the most expensive divorces ever settled — and the most expensive cheque ever written by hand.
Dmitry Rybolovlev — the $4.5 billion award that became $600 million
Russian fertiliser billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev married Elena in 1987. In 2008, after more than two decades together, she filed for divorce, alleging he had been unfaithful many times. What followed was a seven-year legal war fought across several countries.
In May 2014, a court in Geneva awarded her $4.5 billion — half his fortune, and at the time the largest divorce award in history. She was also awarded property in Switzerland worth about $146 million. A year later, his appeal cut the award to about $604 million. In October 2015, the couple reached a private settlement, the terms of which were never disclosed.
Rybolovlev had made his fortune in potash, selling his shares in the fertiliser giant Uralkali for $6.5 billion in 2010. He owns the French football club AS Monaco. His divorce remains one of the most expensive ever fought — and the biggest gap between what a court awarded and what was actually paid.
Sergey Brin — the alleged affair that ended a friendship
Google co-founder Sergey Brin was married to Nicole Shanahan for three years when, in July 2022, a report alleged she had a brief affair with Elon Musk at an art fair in Miami in December 2021 — while she was still married to Brin.
All three denied it. Musk called the story “total bs” and said he had only seen Shanahan twice in three years, both times with other people around. Shanahan called it an “outright lie” and said they never had an affair. The report’s publisher stood by it.
Brin had already filed for divorce in January 2022. It was finalised in 2023, with reports putting the settlement at more than $1 billion. Whatever happened in Miami, the friendship between two of the richest men on earth reportedly did not survive it.
Larry Ellison — the $500 mistake
Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder who briefly became the world’s richest person in September 2025, has been married five times and divorced four.
His second marriage lasted barely a year. When Nancy Wheeler Jenkins divorced him in 1978, she gave up all financial claims to Oracle — for $500. Oracle went public eight years later. That $500 decision is one of the most expensive in history.
His third marriage, to Barbara Boothe, produced two children, David and Megan, who both became film producers. His fourth marriage, to romance novelist Melanie Craft, lasted from 2003 to 2010. In late 2024, at 81, he married for a fifth time, to 33-year-old entrepreneur Jolin Zhu.
Warren Buffett — the arrangement that actually worked
Not every billionaire love story ends in a courtroom. Warren Buffett’s is the strangest, and the happiest.
He married Susan Thompson in 1952. In 1977, after 25 years of marriage, she moved to San Francisco to pursue a singing career. Before she left, she introduced her husband to Astrid Menks, a waitress at a restaurant she sang at, and asked her to look after him. Astrid moved in with Buffett in 1978 and never left.
The three stayed close for the rest of Susan’s life. They sent Christmas cards signed by all three of them: Warren, Susie and Astrid. Susan remained his wife until she died in 2004. Two years later, on his 76th birthday, Buffett married Astrid in a five-person ceremony at his daughter’s house. He has called choosing the right life partner the most important decision a person can make. He chose two, and it worked.
Donald Trump — the $130,000 payment
Donald Trump has been married three times and is the only president in American history with a criminal conviction tied to his love life.
In May 2024, a Manhattan jury found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to adult film performer Stormy Daniels, weeks before the 2016 election. Daniels alleged she had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump denies the affair and any wrongdoing.
He was sentenced in January 2025 to an unconditional discharge — convicted, but with no jail time, fine or other penalty. His lawyers are still fighting the verdict in the courts, with hearings running into November 2026.
The pattern
Twelve billionaires, twelve different ways for a love life to go wrong. Affairs, overlapping families, five weddings, a resignation, a conviction, a $975 million cheque and a $500 mistake.
The money never protects them. It just makes the bill bigger.
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons (Jensen Huang by Anders Eidesvik; Jeff Bezos, US Secretary of War; Bill Gates by Bogdan Hoyaux / European Union; Elon Musk by Gage Skidmore; Tiger Woods, The White House).
