Disclaimer: I am not saying Jensen did nothing. The affairs are real. What I want to write about is how the crowd reacted, because I think René Girard explains this week better than any of the hot takes on Twitter.

A quick Girard primer:

  1. Mimetic desire: We rarely want things on our own. We want what other people want, simply because they want it.
  2. Mimetic rivalry: When everyone chases the same thing they turn into rivals, rivals slowly start to look like each other.
  3. Mimetic crisis: At some point everyone is anxious and copying everyone else, but nobody can tell you where the threat is actually coming from.
  4. The scapegoat: Then, almost out of nowhere, the whole crowd turns on one person. Throwing him out releases all that tension and peace comes back for a while. Whether he is actually guilty barely matters. What matters is that everyone agrees.
  5. Sacralization: Afterwards the victim is remembered as both the cause of the chaos and the reason order came back, half demon and half god.

Now apply this to the AI trade, which might be the most mimetic market we have ever had. Every hyperscaler buys GPUs because the other hyperscalers are buying GPUs, and every fund owns AI stocks because every other fund does. Sequoia pushed out Roelof Botha because the firm felt it had missed the AI wave. That’s how much pressure there is to want what everyone else wants. And for two years we’ve all been worried about a bubble. That is a Girardian crisis: a lot of built-up tension and nowhere for it to go.

The next step is finding the scapegoat.

Girard noticed that scapegoats usually come from the edges of a community, either the outsider or the king. The king makes the classic victim because he sits above everyone and is completely alone up there. In the AI economy that was Jensen, with the leather jacket, center stage at every keynote, and the kind of welcome usually reserved for heads of state. But to a lot of people he is also an outsider, an Asian American who could easily be painted as someone having an affair with a Chinese spy.

That last part matters, because the accusations fit what Girard called the ‘stereotypes of persecution’. He kept finding the same pair in medieval persecution texts and in old myths: sexual transgression, which breaks the order of the community, and contamination from a foreign enemy. Here you get an affair and an alleged spy. Accusations like these feel bigger than one person, as if the whole group is under threat. It also helped that plenty of people in power disagreed with Jensen on open source and on trading with China, and they were not going to waste the moment.

The board, the press, the market and Twitter all landed in the same place at the same time, and you could watch the noise build across every mainstream publication. The reaction was wildly out of proportion to what actually happened, which is what you’d expect if the crowd was really dumping two years of bubble anxiety onto the one person everyone could see. In 2025 everyone wanted to be Jensen. Now people want him gone.

So what comes next? If Girard is right, sacralization. Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985 and came back a god, and my guess is Jensen’s story turns into myth whatever happens: the man who built AI and the man who might nearly broke it. Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard at Stanford, argues that founders are modern sacred kings, worshipped and then sacrificed, sometimes by the same crowd. We have never watched it play out this clearly in a single week.