So if I were writing these rules, I might very well rephrase it as “do you have a very strong friendship with this other person” and “do you occasionally spend time at each other’s houses” to avoid both allonormativity and the temptation to prurient sniffing; and I’d work hard to keep any disclosed information of that form private, like “don’t store in Internet-connected devices or preferably on computers at all” private, to minimize incentives against honest disclosure. And even then, I might expect that among the consequences of the regulation, would be that CEOs in relationships would occasionally just lie to me about it, now that such incentives had been established against disclosure.
When you optimize against visible correlates of possible malfeasance, you optimize first and above all against visibility; and maybe secondarily against possible malfeasance if the visibility is very reliable and the correlations are strong enough to take causal leaning on them.
But, sure, if you know all that and you understand the consequences, then Sequoia could’ve asked if SBF and Caroline were in a relationship, understanding that a No answer might be a lie given the incentives they’d established, and that a Yes answer indicated unusual honesty.
I’m under the impression that mainstream orgs deal with this rather poorly, by having the relationships still happen, but be Big Dark Forbidden Secrets instead of things that people are allowed to actually know about and take into account. But they Pretend to be acting with Great Propriety which is all that matters for the great kayfabe performance in front of those who’d perform pearl-clutching otherwise. People falsifying their romantic relationships to conform to ideas about required public image is part of our present culture of everything being fake; so what loves you forbid from being known and spoken of, by way of trying to forbid the loves themselves, you should forbid very hesitantly.
I think our current culture is better, even in light of current events, because I don’t think the standard culture would have actually prevented this bad outcome (unless almost any minor causal perturbance would’ve prevented it). It would mean that SBF/C’s relationship was just coming out now even though they’d previously supposedly properly broken up before setting up the two companies, or something—if we learned even that much!