“Punked” is slang for being pranked or made a fool of, like “You got punked.” The term was popularized by Punk’d, the MTV hidden-camera show Ashton Kutcher created and hosted starting in 2003, where celebrities were set up with elaborate pranks.
Kutcher was born in 1978, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His career trajectory has had three tracks, going from TV star to film lead and then mega tech investor. That has left him somewhere between being a Democratic activist and fundraiser for causes like support for Ukraine and libertarian anti-regulatory tech conservative. He may be handsome, but he’s more than a pretty face. He studied biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa, then left after winning a modeling contest in 1997. He modeled for Calvin Klein and others before moving to acting. That ’70s Show (1998–2006) made him famous as the lovable dim-bulb Michael Kelso. He created, produced, and hosted Punk’d (MTV, 2003), and produced Beauty and the Geek through his company Katalyst. Then he got into comedy films like Dude, Where’s My Car?, Just Married, Guess Who, What Happens in Vegas, and No Strings Attached. But he also did some drama with The Butterfly Effect (2004), The Guardian (2006), and Jobs (2013), where he played Steve Jobs (how prophetic for a techbro to be).
As a Tech investor, he co-founded A-Grade Investments (2010) with Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle and made early bets included Skype, Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify. He then founded Sound Ventures (2015), which has since moved heavily into AI. He co-founded Thorn with Demi Moore, a nonprofit that builds tech against child exploitation.
He’s the modern definition of a Renaissance Man and he seems to be able to straddle the big worlds of entertainment and tech with all its liberal/conservative push and pull that seems to swirl around the two. And how perfect is it that he has now moved heavily into AI investing just as my economics guru, Paul Krugman, is calling the AI Oligarchy out for being unduly and harmfully governed by their cyberpunk dreams. Cyberpunk is a science fiction subgenre set in a near future where advanced technology coexists with social decay. The shorthand is “high tech, low life” with things like cybernetic implants, artificial intelligence, and vast computer networks sitting beside poverty, crime, and collapsing institutions. Think Elysium, one of my favorite new age dystopian social commentary movies, where Matt Damon helps the huddled masses of earth gain access to modern cure-all healthcare by suiting up with cyborg Six Million Dollar Man technology to do battle against the evil, autocratic oligarchy run by the Pete Hegseth of Battlestar Elysium, played by Jody Foster with a Africaner accent. The analogies and symbolisms are rife.
The common elements include Megacorporations that hold more power than governments, hackers and outsiders as protagonists, often antiheroes working against the system, human–machine merging, such as body modifications, neural interfaces, and virtual reality (“cyberspace”), and neon-soaked, rain-slicked megacities with a noir mood (can you spell Blade Runner?). The term comes from Bruce Bethke’s 1983 short story “Cyberpunk.” William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) defined the genre, and he coined “cyberspace” in his earlier fiction. Other touchstones besides Blade Runner are Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and the game Cyberpunk 2077. More broadly, the word is also used for a visual aesthetic and for a critical outlook on how technology concentrates power.
Now let’s talk about Jensen Huang, the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia. Yep, that Nvidia that sits at the very top of the Megacorporation firmament. Nvidia became the first public company to pass $4 trillion and then $5 trillion in market value, both in 2025. As of mid-2026 it was the world’s largest company at about $5.4 trillion. One analysis noted its value now exceeds the GDP of every country except two…The U.S. and….wait for it…China. Its power comes from control of a chokepoint. Nvidia holds about 81% of the AI data center chip market in 2026. In cyberpunk terms, Nvidia is closer to the company that owns the infrastructure everyone else depends on, which has been described as owning the rails the AI economy runs on. It also ties itself to its biggest customers, committing up to $100 billion to OpenAI, mostly for future chip purchases, plus a $20 billion supply deal with xAI. Cyberpunk megacorps replace governments, but Nvidia is still clearly subject to them…or is it? U.S. export licensing has created uncertainty over how many chips it can sell to China, and its manufacturing depends on TSMC in Taiwan (where Huang was born).
This past weekend a big new Jensen Huang story has broken. On Sunday, Jensen Huang told Nvidia employees he had been in an intimate relationship with a businesswoman accused of being a Chinese spy, and the board opened an independent investigation the same day. The woman is Alice Huang, an executive linked to the data center company Megaspeed (she is not related to him). U.S. intelligence concluded she was a Chinese spy, and her company was buying Nvidia’s advanced chips. It isn’t clear what information she obtained, whether anything sensitive reached Beijing, or how much Huang knew. No criminal charges against either of them have been reported…yet. The Washington angle is the bigger issue. Huang has been among the loudest voices for loosening AI chip sales to China, so analysts expect this to strengthen the export-control hawks. Before the news broke, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already warned senior Trump officials about the relationship. House Republicans have asked Huang to appear before Congress. Huang is Trump’s closest tech/AI advisor and its clear that in Trump’s efforts to support AI dominance contrary to the cautions being warned about runaway AI growth and the opposition to rampant AI datacenter growth by the general public, he has supported Huang, even including him in his recent trip to China and causing DOJ to drop an investigation into Nvidia contravening national security sanctions on the sale of advanced AI chips to China.
WOW! Could you create a bigger, more timely, more multi-faceted scandal than this one? I think all of us, Huang, Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, the American Public…and maybe even Ashton Kutcher, just got Punked.