I have to say, I agree. If Beijing attempted to infiltrate a woman-led tech giant, they’d have to come up with something a bit more sophisticated than a honeypot. It’s hard to imagine a female CEO, with a multi-billion-dollar company on her shoulders, making the time for a string of affairs. At the very least, she would ask a few questions when an attractive foreign operator suddenly started wooing her. Questions like: Who are you? And why are you so interested in me? 

Now we can add to the Chinese spy argument—can you imagine a female CEO tarnishing a multi-trillion-dollar company with a spree of sexcapades? (Huang’s reported affair count is now up to three.) 

Sure, women are involved in sex scandals all the time. (They’re involved in these ones!). But there’s a reason it’s hard to imagine a woman running one of the world’s most important companies putting herself in this position. A woman who makes it to the top of corporate America has to be more disciplined, more strategic, and more careful about her reputation than her male counterparts. She likely had to sacrifice, to claw tooth and nail, just to get there. Even compared to politics, where people take a variety of pathways to elected office, there is just something about the grit required to climb to the heights of the business world that makes a gender-swapped version of a scandal like this feel impossible.

Many men assume they deserve to be at the top–and act accordingly—while women have to continuously prove themselves. A female CEO knows that one bad decision can become her entire legacy. The margin for error is just too small. 

Huang was part of an elite club of men who run the world’s most influential tech businesses—guys known by one name only, like Mark and Elon, who are not just CEOs but leaders of cults of personality. Meanwhile, women still run just 11% of Fortune 500 companies – and while several are hugely influential figures in global business (like GM’s Mary Barra or Lisa Su, who runs Nvidia’s chief competitor AMD), none are one-name-only “rock star” CEOs like the mononymous Jensen. 

Maybe that’s because entrenched barriers in business hold women back from achieving that level of success. Or maybe it’s because they don’t court it. They’re focused on doing their jobs, not building fan clubs. 

So the next time someone argues that women aren’t prepared to run the world’s biggest companies, that they’re too emotional or too risk-averse, consider the alternative. The men already running them are proving that the biggest threat might not be a competitor or even a foreign adversary. It might be the CEO himself.

These men of the AI boom may have built trillion-dollar businesses—but they’re also the ones who can take them down.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

More on Colette x Jensen at Nvidia. The WSJ reports that Nvidia's Jensen Huang "belittled" CFO Colette Kress—now his successor as interim CEO—as a "deer in the headlights" and a "reporting CFO," not someone who could help him make decisions. This was in a meeting in August over Huang's dealmaking spree and Nvidia's growing circular financing of the AI industry. 

Four in five voters say women's rights were important to them in the midterms. For all voters, it was 81%, while for women, it was 86%, according to a survey of 1,500 registered voters. 

Could Christine Lagarde be president of France? She's ending her European Central Bank term early. She has previously said she wouldn't run, but new polling shows she would be ahead of the current centrist candidate. 

WNBA commissioner interviews are underway. The league is aiming to hire a successor to Cathy Engelbert by Dec. 31. In-person interviews are happening now.  

ON MY RADAR

The end of play-it-safe politics New York Magazine

Wicker and what straight women want New Yorker

Keisha Lance Bottoms on what Democrats have to do to not squander the win NYT

PARTING WORDS

"I like to become different people. I am really just trying to completely disappear."

–Actress Julia Garner. She plays Caroline Ellison in the new Netflix series The Altruists about the fall of FTX