This is with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

It could be the biggest financial loss triggered by an affair in history – $430bn. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, disclosed last week that he had an extra-marital affair with Alice Huang (no relation), who is a suspected Chinese spy.

In recent trading, the market value of Nvidia has fallen from more than $5trn to just over $4trn. While not all of that decline is the result of this disclosure – high-tech shares have been weakening anyway – the share price took a sudden lurch downwards when the news came out.

We don’t need to feel too sorry for Jensen Huang. He remains extremely wealthy by any standard, currently ranking 13th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with $141bn. But Nvidia is the world leader in the chips used in artificial intelligence computing and is very much his creation. Given that Alice Huang worked for a Singapore company that is under US scrutiny as to whether it helped China obtain export-restricted US chips, it is possible that he may have to resign. That concern appears to have been the main driver of the hit to the share price.

Since Nvidia was until recently the most valuable company in the world – it is still number two behind Apple – the fall hits investors everywhere, including anyone with a company or personal pension here in the UK. Pensions are invested in mixtures of financial products which track the performance of the markets, and will follow Nvidia’s fall. We are all that little bit poorer as a result. It is the extreme case of an affair costing a lot of money.

So what does it tell us about the financial consequences of this sort of personal behaviour?

It’s a tough one, because it’s difficult to separate the personal and social impact from the economic issues. As the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence states, people are endowed with unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. If they also manage to adhere to what has been dubbed the 11th Commandment – “Thou shalt not get caught” – then you could argue that there is no cost at all. 

But we do know that if an affair leads to a family break-up, that is very expensive. And that’s quite aside from the human costs that a break-up entails, including and arguably especially those that fall on children.

London is often ranked as the divorce capital of the world and it is the choice for many wealthy people. So far the largest settlements have been that between Princess Haya bint Hussein and Sheik Mohammed Al-Maktoum, £554m in 2021. There have been several others of more than £100m over the past 15 years, and the lawyers who have represented the protagonists – for instance Fiona Shackleton, now Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia – have become celebrities themselves. Aside from Princess Haya, her clients have included the King when he divorced Diana, Princess of Wales; Sir Paul McCartney and John Cleese.

These cases have been hugely expensive, but the cost for a typical divorce is for many people ruinously high. Legal costs alone for a contested divorce range between £30,000 and £50,000, and while that can be reduced by mediation, that’s before the split in assets – including the residential home and any pension pots.

So the financial position of both parties is damaged for many years to come. People who are particularly hurt are those whose lives and finances are particularly tightly intertwined: those who have to sell a family home at a bad time in the market, business owners where that ownership is divided, families with a lot of pension wealth, two-earner households, and parents with children who have to reorganise childcare. If the two people divorcing are used to cooperating in practical ways, and with two incomes, then the change is more stark.

Beyond this, there is a wider burden on society as a whole. This was assessed at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £51bn here in the UK – and that was back in 2018. This includes elements such as lower tax receipts, additional benefit payments, housing support, health and social care costs, civil justice, and, I’m afraid, criminal justice costs. If that number is anything like a reasonable estimate, the annual burden must be heading towards £80bn a year now. That’s huge. It’s bigger than the education budget. 

This may all seem a long way from the exploits of Jensen Huang and Alice Huang, or indeed the unalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence. But I don’t think it is. On the one hand, no one should want to live in a more oppressive society. On the other, we must all acknowledge that in our various ways we fall short.

So maybe the lesson of the past few days is that disorder carries costs that can go far beyond the people directly involved, and that we should try and learn that lesson and apply it as best we can in our daily lives.

Need to know

One of the things that I have become increasingly concerned about is not so much the rising disorder of our society, because I don’t think that is really the case. Rather, it is the rising complexity of daily life. 

This includes little things like parking a car. You used to put money in a meter, or buy a ticket at a machine and pop it on the widescreen. Now increasingly frequently you have to download an app. Or you have to remember the number of the car and enter that at the machine, and don’t mistake a zero for a capital O. 

It also includes bigger things such as tax, which will get worse when they start making self-assessed earners pay quarterly. The government explanation says: “Every three months, your compatible software adds together your digital records to create totals for each income and expense category. These totals are then sent to HMRC as a quarterly update.” So what is “your compatible software” and “your digital records”?  

What in practice this means for many people is that either you hire an accountant or bookkeeper who will do all it for you, or you cut your income. Add in all the other burdens and no wonder so many small landlords are selling up. 

I came across a practical example recently. A friend who is a carer has given up the job because they have to keep logging onto online training courses that they felt were useless in practical terms. They said these seem to be devised by some young college-leaver who had no practical experience of what it was like to care for anyone. 

Come back to order in society. We can’t legislate for couples to stay together, nor can we compel men and women not to have affairs. Some societies do punish women (why are they to blame and not the men?) for the latter and that’s dreadful. 

But I do think we could nudge our society towards greater order, because there are social costs that could be reduced if we managed to do so.