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As more people get an early diagnosis, they face the difficult decision about when and how to reveal their condition

“I have Alzheimer’s.”

Those are the three words that many of my patients most dread saying, even to their closest family. They struggle with whom to tell, when to tell, and what to tell.

There was a time not long ago when this wasn’t an issue; by the time a person was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it was pretty obvious that something was wrong. But now, thanks to advances in our ability to detect the disease early, more patients are being forced to confront those questions.

As the director of a memory disorders clinic, I work with such patients all the time, and see how difficult the decisions can be. One patient, an orthodontist who had to take an unexpected retirement even though his cognitive changes were barely detectable, was embarrassed and reluctant to say anything. But he and his wife decided it was time to divulge the truth. He reached out to each one of his colleagues and friends and made that simple revelation: “I have Alzheimer’s.” To his surprise and relief, everyone was supportive and empathetic. Some friends even confessed their own cognitive lapses and sought his advice on what to do.

Sadly, though, not everyone is so lucky. Given the stigma and misunderstandings about the disease, some people infantilize these patients in person or ostracize them in social circles. Co-workers or bosses sometimes question their ability to do their jobs, or perhaps even fire them.

One of my patients has two well-meaning daughters but they get frustrated with her memory lapses and sometimes scold her for them. “I hate defending myself,” my patient tells me, “but I have to have my voice heard and remind them that I’m still here.”

Still, while the reveal can be agonizing, if done carefully, the payoff can help normalize and support an otherwise difficult path.

There is no hard and fast rule about when to tell people. It depends. But the one guiding light should be that it serves a purpose.

For my orthodontist patient and his wife, they believed the disclosure would dispel growing suspicions among family and friends. Even though the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are often subtle, they may be more noticeable in social and work settings when a person is behaving or performing differently from before. As the disease unfolds, these mild changes are amplified by commonly associated problems such as anxiety, depression or apathy. Disclosing to others the reasons behind these changes can enable them to better understand and rally behind the affected person.

Beyond that, here are some other considerations when disclosing:

• There must be a clear and certain diagnosis based on a comprehensive and expert evaluation. Revealing a false or uncertain diagnosis only complicates the disclosure.

• The person disclosing the diagnosis must be able to explain it correctly. Telling someone you have Alzheimer’s disease without knowing exactly what that means may unnecessarily confuse them. A vague explanation may lead people to google the diagnosis and read about all sorts of extraneous, irrelevant and hyperbolic details that may never apply to the affected person.

• Focus on simple explanations and describe the current state without speculating on the future. Leave that to the experts.

• The timing and audience for a disclosure should depend on whether it helps the affected person feel understood, normalized and supported. When these factors are off, it can sometimes backfire. For example, one patient revealed her diagnosis to two co-workers in the salon where she worked, hoping they would better understand her occasional lapses. One co-worker was supportive and jumped in to help when needed, while the other began to steer away clients since she perceived her as more impaired than she actually was. In retrospect, my patient wishes she had been more selective about who she told.

As the disease progresses and symptoms become more obvious, the circle of people in the know will likely enlarge, providing a precious opportunity to accurately educate them and seek their support.

The basic strategy of how to tell others about an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is to craft the message to their level of understanding and involvement. A close family or friend, for instance, will benefit from a direct reveal of the diagnosis along with a basic explanation of how it was determined. Since people will be motivated to help, it’s also good to be specific about what’s needed, such as planning regular and enjoyable social activities and excursions, help with transportation and breaks for the caregiver.

If a diagnosis is made in midlife, there may be school-age children or adolescents who need to be told. Again, the guiding rule should be to speak to their level of understanding, provide reassurance and normalize life for them. It also depends on the specific child: While the diagnosis may frighten a more-dependent child, it may be taken in stride by a more-independent teen.

Sharing a diagnosis with a co-worker, supervisor or employer carries the risk that they will scrutinize the person’s job performance and worry about productivity, safety and liability. One of my patients who is an attorney was asked to retire immediately after informing his firm, not because of concerns about his still-excellent performance, but due to fears of how clients and opposing parties might question it if word got out.

An Alzheimer’s specialist is best able to judge how the disease may affect work and whether adjustments or even early retirement need to be considered. If a disclosure to one’s employer seems necessary, a confidential discussion with human resources staff is always the best first step.

There are a few golden rules for someone who is the recipient of a reveal.

First, listen and don’t make it about yourself or other people you know with cognitive changes. Everyone is different and you need to simply let someone describe his or her own journey.

Second, don’t offer your own theories or therapies; leave it to the experts.

Third, spend time with such people as you normally would and don’t ostracize or abandon them. You can’t catch it from being around them.

Fourth, focus on people’s strengths and abilities and don’t remind them of what they forgot or can’t do as well.

Fifth, ask about family and care partners, who are going to need your support as well. Don’t be shy: Ask affected individuals and care partners what is needed, and jump in. It can be a lonely road without the presence of others.

After three decades of service in the Alzheimer’s storm, I know how tough it is to navigate a diagnostic disclosure, whether from doctor to patient or from patient to friends and family. But I have one firm belief, which is that the way we provide care and support has the potential to change each person’s course for the better. It isn’t always easy, and we sometimes have to fight our own instincts, but doing it right can make all the difference.

Commerce secretary says products given reprieve will fall under separate regime

US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick has warned that smartphones, computers and other electronics imported to America from China will still face tariffs, dealing a blow to hopes of a reprieve for Big Tech companies such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft.

Donald Trump’s administration this weekend excluded phones and other consumer electronics from steep “reciprocal” tariffs in what was a significant boost for tech groups whose stocks plunged after the president unleashed a global trade war on “liberation day”.

But speaking on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Lutnick said such products would be re-examined as part of a government probe into semiconductors, which face a separate round of tariffs. 

“What he’s doing is he’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs,” Lutnick said, referring to the US president. “But they’re included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two.”

When asked to clarify whether tariffs on iPhones might “come back on in a month or so”, Lutnick replied: “Correct. That’s right . . . We need our medicines and we need semiconductors and our electronics to be built in America.”

Lutnick’s comments will spark further business uncertainty concerning Trump’s tariff rollout, which has been marked by a series of reversals that have caused a share price rollercoaster and an intense sell-off last week in the $29tn US Treasuries market.

Any softening of tariffs on Chinese imports would be a big win for the likes of Microsoft and Apple, which makes about 80 per cent of its iPhones in China, according to analyst estimates.

Over the course of the past week, Trump ratcheted up his extra tariffs on China to 145 per cent, even as he offered a 90-day pause on his “reciprocal” tariffs on other countries. The president maintained a 10 per cent tariff on most US trading partners.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Sunday that the US would talk to its trading partners. “We’ve got 90 deals in 90 days possibly pending here, and it was par for the course,” Navarro said.

US levies on Chinese imports, which have been increased in response to retaliatory tariffs from Beijing, include a 20 per cent tariff in retaliation for the country’s role in fentanyl production alongside a 125 per cent “reciprocal” tariff.

The exemptions offered to consumer technology goods on Friday apply only to reciprocal tariffs. All imports from China, including goods exempt from reciprocal levies, are still subject to an extra 20 per cent tariff under Trump.

Beijing on Sunday urged the White House to cancel the full extent of the “reciprocal” tariffs, arguing that “there are no winners in a trade war, and there is no way out for protectionism”.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said it was a “small step for the US to correct its wrongful unilateral reciprocal tariffs”, but that it was “evaluating the relevant impact”.

It added that the US should “take a big step in correcting its mistakes, completely cancel the wrong practice of reciprocal tariffs and return to the correct path of mutual respect”.

The last grand strategists: what Brzezinski and Kissinger could teach Trump

Living parallel lives, they counselled presidents and changed the course of the cold war. How would they steer America today?

Picture Muhammad Ali limbering up for his great Kinshasa “rumble in the jungle” with George Foreman. Or Björn Borg squaring off for a Wimbledon centre court final with John McEnroe. Most fittingly, ruminate on chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer ahead of his 1972 Reykjavík “match of the century” against Soviet opponent Boris Spassky.

Although it spanned decades and influenced the course of two superpowers, the rivalry between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, America’s great cold war strategists, merits equivalent hyphenation. Brzezinski-Kissinger was to US geopolitics what great pairing is to sport. Their core difference was over whether to sustain cold war détente — easing the strains — with America’s mortal rival or to resume ideological struggle with the USSR. 

Kissinger won the battle of celebrityhood. In my view Brzezinski won their cold war dispute on points. Kissinger was wrong to presume the Soviets would be a permanent feature of the landscape. Brzezinski correctly saw the USSR’s dormant nations, including Ukraine, as its Achilles heel. Either way, their clash over how to manage the cold war mattered as much as today’s schism between those in Donald Trump’s world who laud his wish for détente with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and those who see both imposing a Munich-style disaster on Ukraine.

On the fate of Ukraine rests the future of war and peace. A key distinction from the Kissinger-Brzezinski era is that no one today can match either’s intellectual creativity, public reputation and diplomatic weight. America’s missing strategy, in other words, owes something to the absence of grand strategists. 

What did they have that eludes their lesser-known heirs in today’s America? The simplistic answer is that Kissinger and Brzezinski were immigrants. Newcomers often value America’s freedoms more than its native-born and are statistically far likelier to start companies, win Nobel Prizes and indeed launch schools of thought.

Brzezinski’s rise as a Sovietologist at Harvard then Columbia in the age of America’s “cold war university” — a public-private collaboration that is the mirror image of Trump’s war on Ivy League budgets — coincided with Kissinger’s emergence as a Harvard name and bestselling diplomatic historian. Each had surpassing ambitions that shocked many of their more cloistered (and less egotistical) peers. 

A richer pointer can be found in the tales of their emigration. It was no accident that a 15-year-old Heinz Kissinger arrived in America a month before Neville Chamberlain’s infamous 1938 betrayal of Czechoslovakia in Munich. A few weeks later, a 10-year-old Brzezinski caught his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty having left Europe’s shores two days after Hitler completed his occupation of the Sudetenland.

Each had been raised in the “bloodlands” of interbellum Europe. One was a Jewish-German refugee whose extended family would be wiped out in the Holocaust; the other was the son of a Polish diplomat whose country would be razed less than a year later when the Soviets and Nazis spliced Poland in history’s ugliest vivisection.

They were marked in different ways by the harrowing fate of those they left behind. Given a choice between order and justice, Kissinger said he would always choose order. His people were liquidated amid history’s most brutal disorder. Brzezinski would have chosen justice. Wounded Polishness — a sense of amputated history — was the launch pad of his ambition. 

Crucially, though, they shared a burning sense of the tragic. “As immigrants, we knew about the fragility of societies and we had an instinct for the transitoriness of human perceptions,” Kissinger told me in 2021, four years after Brzezinski died aged 89 in Virginia and two and a half years before Kissinger himself passed away in Connecticut having recently turned 100.

Kissinger was among the sources for my full biography of Brzezinski, which comes out next month. The difference between the two, in Kissinger’s view, was that Kissinger came from Germany but had not been defined by it, while Brzezinski had been defined by Poland, although it had “not set limits on what he became”. 

But Kissinger wanted to stress what they had in common. Together, though with Kissinger as the pioneer, they supplanted the old Anglo-American elite. Figures such as Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and John McCloy conducted diplomacy as a second career or part-time obligation. Kissinger and Brzezinski, on the other hand, were brash professionals who lacked the social ties of the Georgetown wise men. In Acheson’s words, the former were “present at the creation” of the US-made postwar order. Kissinger and Brzezinski grappled varyingly with the existential threat to that order.

More important, however, was their exposure to societal breakdown and the eternity of geopolitics — an experience that no Wasp could emulate. “The question is whether Americans can ever understand that we are living in a continuous experience that has no end, and that you can never segment life into different problems,” Kissinger said. “[As Europeans] we knew that we were living in a continuous history. It never comes to an end.” He might also have quoted the great American novelist William Faulkner, who said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

The worldliness of these two modern-day viziers was also manifested in very different ways. Kissinger was seductive, a master of flattery and a maestro of the press conference. Brzezinski was better at making media enemies. His theory of the case — that the USSR was a gerontocracy in terminal decline — barely wavered. Kissinger, on the other hand, was strategically amorphous. He perfected the art of illusory action — “motion without movement”, as he called it. But he always gravitated back to his 1815 Congress of Vienna lodestar; a world in which great powers strove to be in balance. Brzezinski’s worldview was filtered through the smaller players — not just his native Poland but the myriad national groups within the USSR whose separatist inclinations he sought to awake. 

Kissinger had almost as little time for Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America as Trump, although he cut those services in annual salami slices rather than in one fell swoop. Brzezinski, who spoke Russian, Polish and some German, resumed ideological warfare behind the iron curtain, which he saw as porous.

Kissinger was a juggler; Brzezinski a boxer. When the latter accused Kissinger of “acrobatics” during the Nixon years, they nearly fell out. In spite of their often irascible disputes, the Republican and Democratic sparring partners never stinted on dinners at Sans Souci, a French restaurant (since closed) near the White House. You went there to be seen. “One always learns more from ‘friendly critics’ than from uncritical friends,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski after one such meal in the early 1970s. It is hard to imagine such a garrulous frenemyship in today’s Washington. 

The subject of tariffs never arose. Theirs was a time when the US was opening markets and laying the foundations of globalisation. On that, the two strategists absent-mindedly agreed — economics was not either’s strong suit. Today, Trump is bludgeoning that project into reverse.

Opening to China was a central feature of both Kissinger and Brzezinski’s careers. Does Trump yet have a China strategy? Notions of Trump pulling off a “reverse Kissinger” — bringing the Russians into America’s orbit, much as Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet split in the other direction — are fanciful. Steve Witkoff, the New York property developer, now Trump’s all-purpose envoy, has recently proved no match for Putin. A reverse Brzezinski — cutting ties with China and recognising Taiwan — is thankfully hard to foresee even with Trump’s unpredictability. 

Given the secrecy with which Richard Nixon and Kissinger had to pursue America’s surprise 1972 opening to China, Beijing put a premium on personal dialogue. Urbane, silky and erudite, China’s premier Zhou Enlai was the ultimate mandarin and an ideal counterpart for Kissinger. Nixon and Mao Zedong struck the opening chords. Kissinger and Zhou sustained the duet.

Zhou’s replacement by Deng Xiaoping robbed Kissinger of his most cherished interlocutor. It was precisely the qualities that Kissinger most disliked in Deng — the Chinese premier’s blunt, sometimes uncouth, manner, and his impatience with euphemism — that most appealed to Brzezinski.

Their mutual allergy to the Soviets was the propellant of Jimmy Carter’s China move. Brzezinski was Carter’s national security adviser, as Kissinger had been to Nixon. Neither the Chinese premier’s well-used spittoon nor his chain-smoking of Lesser Panda cigarettes could check Brzezinski’s deep respect for him. Deng was “a man tiny in size but great in boldness”, Brzezinski thought. China’s 4ft 11in tall leader likewise valued Brzezinski’s directness.

Having all but gutted Kissinger’s détente, Brzezinski became known in China’s media as the “polar bear tamer” — the bear being Deng’s nickname for the USSR. Kissinger had wanted to keep an “equilateral” distance between the US, USSR and China. Under Carter, they became de facto partners.

Either way, it is hard to imagine Trump plunging into countless hours of tactical back-and-forth with China’s President Xi Jinping or Putin. Nor would Trump be likely to give his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or secretary of state, Marco Rubio, anything close to Kissinger-Brzezinski latitude.

Deng spent his first night on American soil at a boozy dinner in Brzezinski’s Virginia family home. It was the start of the first ever US state visit by a Chinese leader. They toasted US-China normalisation with vodka presented to Brzezinski by Anatoly Dobrynin, the USSR’s ambassador in Washington. Guests were served by Brzezinski’s children. His 11-year-old daughter, Mika, spilled Russian caviar (also from Dobrynin) into Deng’s lap, and tried to clean it up with a napkin.

The next day, Nixon was controversially present at Deng’s state dinner — the disgraced president’s first return to the US capital since his Watergate exit. Brzezinski persuaded Carter that Nixon’s addition would cement China’s confidence in America’s bilateral embrace. Kissinger abruptly turned against normalisation. But his pique was fleeting. He would go on to become China’s favourite visiting American. 

How would each handle today’s Russian war on Ukraine? In spite of their differences, it is a good bet that neither Brzezinski nor Kissinger would have advised Trump to offer concessions to Russia ahead of peace talks. Sweeteners are meant to be dangled not gift-wrapped in advance.

Nixon and Kissinger toast the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement with Soviet leaders in 1972 © Bridgeman Images

Both would have been mortified by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance’s Oval Office humiliation in February of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As a seducer, Kissinger caught most of his flies with honey. Razor sharp and occasionally prickly, Brzezinski was closer to a Venus flytrap. Neither would have seen Zelenskyy as prey, still less in front of the cameras.

It is impossible to imagine either speaking about Putin in the manner Witkoff recently did to the Maga broadcaster Tucker Carlson. Witkoff disclosed that Putin had said he had prayed for Trump in church after last summer’s assassination attempt. The Russian leader also presented Witkoff with a flattering portrait of Trump. Putin was “enormously gracious”, said Witkoff. “It takes balls to say that,” Carlson replied. Whatever becomes of Trump’s Russia-Ukraine peacemaking ambition, Putin seems to have a better read of Trump than Trump of Putin. 

Late in life, Kissinger and Brzezinski nearly swapped their Russia positions. In a 2014 op-ed for the FT, Brzezinski argued for the “Finlandisation” of Ukraine, which would make it an unallied, though pro-western, buffer state between Russia and Nato. Even more startlingly, Kissinger endorsed Ukraine’s Nato membership following Russia’s 2022 invasion. Kissinger’s U-turn can probably be attributed to his habit of keeping within the bounds of consensus, one linked to the needs of Kissinger Associates, his thriving business. Access to the White House and other chancelleries was vital to his consultancy.

Brzezinski did not run a business. He thus had no need to curb his views. He criticised every president. This included Barack Obama, whom he had endorsed for president and admired partly because of his opposition to the 2003 Iraq war. Bill Clinton, who turned first to thank Brzezinski after he signed the bill ratifying Nato’s initial expansion in 1999 that included Poland, also fell out of Brzezinski’s favour because of his alleged soft treatment of the newly elected Putin. The exception was Jimmy Carter, with whom he remained life-long friends. 

Brzezinski’s diluted stance on Russia can be explained by a dose of autumnal softening, although he never lost his dark view of Putin. It took his children a while to persuade him to install a pacemaker after he had a stroke in late 2014. The prospect offended him on several levels; the device would be a reminder of his dwindling lifespan; it entailed technology to which he had an instinctive aversion; worst of all, it would upload data to a receptor that could expose him to compromise. The Russians would be able to hack into his medical information. “You know, I think Putin has enough on his plate right now to be worrying about your medical data, Dad,” said his older son, Ian Brzezinski. His middle child, Mark, later became Biden’s ambassador to Poland. 

Critics of Kissinger and Brzezinski have plenty of material to play with. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal, beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies,” was Rolling Stone’s obituary headline. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, his backing of Pakistan’s bloody suppression of the uprising in what was to become Bangladesh, the US-backed coup in Chile and wiretapping his own staff dogged Kissinger for the rest of his life. Yet he also negotiated the first nuclear arms control agreement and came close to clinching a second. Détente was no chimera. The older he got, the more Kissinger was treated as an oracle.

Brzezinski’s time in government left no blood on his hands. Carter was the only postwar president never to order soldiers into combat, although eight servicemen died in the aborted Iran hostage rescue attempt. Brzezinski did help lure the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979, although it was obviously Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to invade. “They’ve taken the bait!” Brzezinski allegedly told an aide on hearing the news. The origins of global jihadism can partly be dated to then. But claims that Brzezinski played “godfather of al-Qaeda” are an absurd leap. The terrorist group was formed seven years after Carter left office. 

Some argue that today’s conditions make it far harder for a Kissinger or a Brzezinski to emerge. In the digital age, geostrategic manoeuvring is so much more difficult to execute. Their by no means overlapping detractors say it is a good thing they lack contemporary equivalents. Yet, to paraphrase what one of Trump’s favourite movie characters, Hannibal Lecter, said of his interrogator, the world was more interesting with Kissinger and Brzezinski in it. And to edit-quote someone else, competing strategies beat no strategy.

When Brzezinski died, Kissinger was surprised how bereft he felt. The two had first met in Harvard 67 years earlier. “How central Zbig’s presence had been to my image of a world worth living in and defending hit home with an unexpected force,” Kissinger wrote to Brzezinski’s family on learning of his death. “I felt as if a sustaining pillar of the structure of the world I cared about had disappeared . . . We shared, I like to think, a cause, if not always our ambitions.”

In death, more than life, these two naturalised Americans seem to get along. As their era recedes, and as America repudiates the world it made, both figures deserve study.

Edward Luce is the FT’s national editor. His biography ‘Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet’ is published next month by Bloomsbury in the UK and by Avid Reader Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, in the US. It is available for pre-order

How Nvidia became the driving force behind the AI revolution

Two books chart the rise of the chipmaker via its ‘benevolent dictator’ Jensen Huang and an early gamble on deep learning

Jensen Huang has often tried to explain what his business does. Yet, even after Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company, many people can barely pronounce its name right, let alone understand how an outfit that started out making graphics chips for video games ended up powering a revolution in artificial intelligence and writing a new chapter in computing history.

One of Nvidia’s more eye-catching attempts at corporate self-explanation came at a company event back in 2008. It enlisted the hosts of pop-science TV show MythBusters to demonstrate the difference between its graphics processing units (the GPUs that today form the silicon backbone of OpenAI and its ilk) and the central processing units made by its rival Intel.

It involved paintball guns. If traditional CPUs are like a single gun popping blobs of paint to make a simple smiley face, GPUs are a giant 1,100-barrel paintball machine that splats out a pixelated Mona Lisa in a fraction of a second. While CPUs work one task at a time, Nvidia’s GPUs can handle multiple calculations all at once.

This “parallel processing” is ideal for accelerating tasks such as rendering graphics in video games — and crunching an entire internet’s worth of data to create the AI system behind ChatGPT. It was that capability to enable the AI revolution that sent Silicon Valley giants scrambling to spend billions on Nvidia’s chips and investors piling into the company’s stock, propelling its market capitalisation to $3tn. By 2024 Nvidia had become, as Goldman Sachs put it, “the most important stock on earth”.

Most of the stock market gains — the shares rose roughly 50,000 per cent between the MythBusters stunt and their peak this January — were made following ChatGPT’s launch in 2022. That may explain why nobody had written a book about Nvidia before — and why two corporate biographies have now been published within five months.

Tae Kim’s diligent and thorough The Nvidia Way arrived first. But it is Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine, out this month, that provides the richer and more accessible account of Nvidia’s 30-year journey from Silicon Valley also-ran to AI behemoth some of whose hardware, he writes, ranks alongside Turing’s Colossus and the Apple II as “one of the most important computers ever built”.

It was the capability of Nvidia’s GPUs to enable the AI revolution that sent Silicon Valley giants scrambling to spend billions on its chips and investors piling into its stock

Both books centre their narrative on Nvidia’s co-founder and chief executive Huang, dubbed “Professor Jensen” by Kim. In a tech industry that venerates founders, Huang is the last of Silicon Valley’s pre-dotcom chief executives still running his own company. His tech icon status is only burnished by his long battle against doubters and, now, ungodly wealth.

Portrayed as a benevolent dictator with a penchant for aphorisms and yelling at underlings, Huang has lived every entrepreneurial trope: the rags to riches immigrant; several near-death experiences; the David vs Goliath battle; and the unlikely gamble that is now finally paying off.

“What mattered at Nvidia wasn’t profits or revenues,” writes Witt, a Los Angeles-based journalist and author whose last book explained how online piracy roiled the music industry. “What mattered was the obsessive chief executive and his crazy long-shot bets. Either you believed in him or you didn’t.”

Working in the semiconductor industry meant the Taiwanese-American spent much of his career out of the spotlight, as attention focused on the tech founders whose products were familiar first-hand to billions of people.

Yet Huang — who now argues Nvidia makes not merely chips but “AI factories” — shares many attributes with Silicon Valley’s best-known names. He has the raw intelligence of Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Elon Musk’s long-term thinking; Steve Jobs’ knack for predicting what people want before they know it themselves; Mark Zuckerberg’s ability to pivot a multibillion-dollar company on a dime; Jeff Bezos’ underdog mentality. Beyond such Olympian tech-bro traits, both books also highlight Huang’s more everyday human qualities — focus, workaholism, luck and a dry sense of humour.

Lately, Huang has leaned into his newfound celebrity. At Nvidia’s annual GTC conference for AI developers last month, clad in his trademark leather jacket — the product of a makeover instigated by his wife and daughter — Huang wielded a cannon firing T-shirts into the crowd that packed out an ice hockey stadium to hear his one-man, two-hour keynote.

The conference also featured “Nvidia Breakfast Bytes”, a branded meal from restaurant chain Denny’s. The teenage Huang, who moved to the US aged nine, washed dishes at a Portland, Oregon branch of the all-American diner. Bottomless coffees at a Silicon Valley Denny’s later fuelled Nvidia’s three founders as they hatched their plan to take on Intel, then the dominant force in semiconductors.

The two authors, who both confess to being video game addicts, each chart Nvidia’s rocky journey from Denny’s to creating, as Witt puts it, “the world’s most coveted microchip”. (By late 2023, two of the world’s richest men — Musk and Larry Ellison, co-founder of software giant Oracle — were begging Huang to sell them more of his chips over sushi at Nobu in Palo Alto.)

The framing of Kim’s account centres on Huang’s management maxims — such as working as if the company was always “30 days from going out of business”, which at one point it was — and Nvidia’s unusually flat corporate structure. More than 30 managers report to the chief executive, who obsessively fights bureaucracy. Instead of hiding in a corner office, Huang stalks Nvidia’s headquarters, able to jump into deep technical conversations with almost any of its 36,000 employees. Those who ramble nervously in response are told “LUA”: “Listen to the question. Understand the question. Answer the question”.

Even when Jensen erupts into one of his infamous shouting sessions, failing staff rarely get fired, as they might at Musk’s X or Tesla. “No one loses alone” is another Huang motto. “I’ve been afraid of Jensen sometimes,” one employee tells Witt. “But I also know that he loves me.”

Where Kim — a veteran Nvidia follower, first as an investment analyst, now as business journalist — is more into the hardware and corporate culture, Witt prefers people. He tells his story through an engaging cast of Valley supernerds: the misfit academics, game designers and programming geniuses who helped Nvidia survive its early failures to seize what Huang identified early as a “once in a lifetime opportunity” in AI. These vivid characters help the reader navigate the chewier technical details about the unlikely marriage of parallel processing and computers that could “think”.

The key to that trillion-dollar combination actually lies not in Nvidia’s hardware but its Cuda software, a project which began in the mid-2000s to “turn your graphics card into a supercomputer”. This revolutionary idea would become the most powerful shift in how chips work for decades.

When Cuda began, Witt reckons Huang’s gambles had lost more than they’d won. Its stock languished and Nvidia was targeted by activist investors, who pushed Huang to stick to gaming instead of a quixotic mission to use parallel processors for scientific discovery or mining exploration. But Huang refused to ditch Cuda, even when his peers in the chip industry thought he was on to another loser. “It was the bet that made Jensen Jensen,” writes Witt. “It was the gamble that set him apart.”

In 2013, Huang sent a Friday-night email to the entire company telling them Nvidia was no longer in the graphics business and was going all in on deep learning

The breakthrough came with the 2012 introduction of the AlexNet image classification system, whose creators used an Nvidia GPU to do in 30 seconds what would have taken an hour on a standard Intel machine. As buzz about this new approach to AI rippled through Silicon Valley, Huang, who had just turned 50, sent a Friday-night email to the entire company telling them Nvidia was no longer in the graphics business and was going all in on deep learning. A decade later, he was proved very right.

Though Witt does not gloss over the science bits of transformer architectures and FinFET transistors, there are some odd omissions, even if these help sustain The Thinking Machine’s brisk pace. An early-2000s brush with what the US financial regulator called “accounting misconduct”, which contributed to its prolonged share-price slump, is dealt with in half a page. The book also barely scratches the surface of Nvidia’s complex relationship with China, the risks of its overwhelming dependence on Taiwanese manufacturing and its challenges in wrangling the US government’s chip export controls.

But if Witt downplays geopolitics, so too, apparently, does Huang. In the book’s most alarming revelation, the author claims that Nvidia has done “no contingency planning” for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, following an edict from Huang. “I don’t want [Nvidia’s logistics chief] spending one brain cell on trying to mitigate that, because it’s impossible for her to do so,” he is quoted by Witt as saying.

Witt is more worried about world war three being fought against robots than China. At the same time as marvelling at Nvidia’s technology, the author says his anxiety about AI and its threat to humanity — first writers, then the world? — motivated the book. Yet when he challenges Huang on it, the CEO replies: “I’m so tired of this question.”

“They were building the Manhattan Project of computer science,” Witt writes, “but when I questioned Nvidia executives about the wisdom of unleashing such power, they looked at me like I was questioning the utility of the washing machine.”

Kim ends on a more prosaic question, though arguably more relevant to Nvidia’s investors: Huang’s precarious position as its “single point of failure”. Both books portray Huang, now 62, as a solitary figure at the centre of his company.

After Jobs died, Sir Jony Ive and Tim Cook led Apple even further into the stratosphere. But which of Nvidia’s dozens of deputies can step in when Huang finally hangs up his leather jacket?

- Orbis believes that AEON should offer to buy 100% of the merged Tsuruha entity for cash at a price greater than the ¥15,500 per share AEON paid for Oasis’ 13.41% stake in Tsuruha to reflect a control premium.

Orbis calls upon Tsuruha shareholders to reject the proposed Merger at the 26 May AGM, and on Tsuruha’s board to allow other interested parties to offer a higher price, accompanied by the opportunity to conduct full due diligence to support their potential bids. Indeed, we believe that a fair price to take control of Tsuruha is likely to be in excess of ¥15,500 per share, and could be around ¥20,000 per share.

Crippling sanctions and systemic corruption push ordinary Iranians to the brink at a politically sensitive moment

MUSCAT, Oman—The threat of U.S. military intervention helped bring Iran back to the negotiating table. Its hobbled economy is likely to keep it there.

Iran’s currency is among the weakest in the world. Inflation remains well above 30%. Young people are struggling to find work, and a frustrated middle class can no longer afford to buy imported goods.

Those troubles look set to intensify under a second Trump administration, which resumed its campaign of “maximum pressure” to force Iran to rein in its nuclear program and prevent it from developing a bomb. Already severely strained by sanctions and endemic corruption, political observers and analysts say a further deterioration of Iran’s economy could push its people to the brink.

“This is a country that’s creaking under the pressure of economic sanctions, sustained mismanagement and corruption,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Ultimately, what they seek is durable sanctions relief, and they believe that Donald Trump could perhaps deliver that in a way that the Biden administration couldn’t.”

Officials from the U.S. and Iran convened in the Omani capital on Saturday for their highest-level talks in years, pledging to keep a conversation going. Washington wants a new deal to curb Tehran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for lifting sanctions, after abandoning an earlier one during President Trump’s first term.

Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, agreed to by Iran and other nations during the Obama administration in 2015, was followed by a wave of crippling sanctions targeting crucial sectors such as oil and finance. Since returning to the White House, Trump has ratcheted up pressure with more sanctions against Chinese terminal and ship operators that do business with Tehran.

Distrust is high on both sides, but each has reasons to want talks to succeed.

For Trump, a deal with Iran would burnish his peacemaker credentials, as his administration has made little progress toward ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as he promised. For Tehran, an easing of sanctions could reverse a yearslong downturn in the economy that, if unaddressed, could threaten the authoritarian regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

There are signs that Tehran is worried about unrest at a politically sensitive time. The regime is quietly bracing for an eventual leadership change—Khamenei is 85 years old and has a history of illness. The reach of its military power has diminished abroad. Israeli attacks have crippled Iran-backed militias in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, while a revolution in Syria cost Tehran a close ally. The election last year of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian signaled that Iran’s security establishment was open to some degree of change.

“This was the Pezeshkian bet, and that of the people who allowed him to run and to win, that if they don’t allow reform, the consequence will be revolution,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.

Alterman said Iran’s economic troubles could be nearing a tipping point. “There is a very visible class of Iranians who are tied to the power structure who drive expensive sports cars, and they’re billionaires,” he said. “Most of the rest of the country is growing gradually more impoverished, but they see that the children of senior government officials live unthinkably luxurious lives.”

Anecdotal accounts of Iran’s economic turmoil are scarce because of the country’s censorship and isolation. But economists say data paints a worrying picture, particularly for the rural poor and a shrinking middle class. The cost of food, for example, increased 41% in March from the same month last year, according to the Central Bank of Iran. And while the economy is expanding overall, growth is slowing and is further threatened by power shortages.

Gregory Brew, a senior analyst for the Eurasia Group specializing in U.S.-Iran relations, said sanctions imposed since 2018 didn’t cause a sudden crash, but a slow strangling of economic activity. Iranian consumers accustomed to European goods like cosmetics, clothes and jewelry—things that symbolized their ascendance to the middle class—have had to adjust their tastes as trade reoriented toward China and Russia.

Meanwhile, many ordinary Iranians are finding it harder just to get by. Mostafa Pakzad, an Iranian financial adviser, said that even residents of Tehran, who tend to be more affluent than those who live outside the capital, are struggling to cope with rising prices. Some have resorted to selling free medicine they get from the government to earn money for essentials like rice and bread, he said.

A 41-year-old man named Abbas, who lives in the central Iranian city of Shiraz, told The Wall Street Journal that he lost most of his savings when the country’s stock exchange crashed in 2023. About a year later, he lost his job of 15 years as an accountant. What little he has left is rapidly losing value as the currency continues its free fall and consumer prices rise.

“Money is like ice, it melts very fast,” he said.

“Inflation is probably the No. 1 concern of the people right now,” said Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech who specializes in Iran. “It’s very painful for people because there’s a psychological element of working hard, getting a wage, and then going to a store just to see it disappear,” he said.

Despite the pressure, he is doubtful Tehran will commit to major change. More likely, he said, the regime will give enough to keep talks going and extract small economic concessions from the U.S. while gradually chipping away at its demands.

“They have tolerated a lot of hardship, and they haven’t surrendered yet,” he said.

Comments follow emergency measures to bring British Steel under government control

Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds has suggested there will be a high bar for Chinese investment in Britain in the coming years after he passed emergency legislation to keep British Steel afloat.

Acknowledging the sensitivity of the steel industry to strategic national interests, Reynolds said on Sunday: “I would not personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector.”

Asked whether there was a “high trust bar” for Chinese companies controlling UK businesses, he said: “Yes, we have got to recognise that.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer took the extraordinary step of recalling parliament on Saturday during Easter recess to pass emergency legislation allowing the UK to wrest control of British Steel from its Chinese owner, Jingye Group.

Reynolds told Sky News that whether the government could trust Chinese companies after Jingye’s handling of British Steel would depend on which sectors they operated in.

He said: “I think we have got to be clear about what is the sort of sector where, actually, we can promote and co-operate, and ones frankly where we can’t. I wouldn’t personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector.”

He added that he was not accusing the Chinese state of being “directly behind” recent decisions taken by Jingye. 

The government intervened to preserve primary steelmaking in the UK and protect 3,500 jobs. While Jingye remains the main shareholder for now, the legislation is a key step on the road to nationalisation of British Steel.

Ministers said they had to act to secure the raw materials needed to ensure the company’s two blast furnaces at its site in Scunthorpe kept working.

Officials were on Sunday working closely with British Steel’s local management to secure new cargoes of coke and iron ore to continue production, people close to the company confirmed.

The steelmaker’s local management was also considering working with other industry participants to secure raw materials. More than a dozen businesses had offered raw material support to the company over the past 24 hours, according to the people.

The company, said one of the people, was also reassessing whether it was possible to reverse the decision made by Jingye executives to idle one of the furnaces on a temporary basis. 

“No options are off the table right now and the sole focus is retaining blast furnace operations,” they said. 

Reynolds on Sunday said that while his preferred option would be to find a private sector partner to help finance the future transformation of British Steel, the more probable option was full nationalisation.

The intervention has led to fresh scrutiny of the former Conservative government’s decision to sell the UK’s last strategic steel group to a Chinese company in 2020.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said that Jingye was clearly “a bad actor” and criticised the Tories, telling the BBC on Sunday: “They effectively gave a strategic industry to a foreign opponent.”

Reform is seen as Labour’s main rival in the local elections on May 1, and Farage has sought to position his party as the principle political advocate for key industrial sectors across Britain.

Reynolds said that British Steel recorded £233mn in losses in the last financial year but that the cost of the steelmaker collapsing completely would have exceeded £1bn.

The Conservative MP for Chingford and Woodford Green, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, said on Saturday that the previous Conservative government “should never have awarded [Jingye] the contract”.

“I warned them about that,” he told MPs. “It is time for us to make sure that we deal with China at face value and do not accept the pretence that this company is private or in any way detached from its government. That is a critical point.”