Comment by aurareturn
4 hours ago
Sadly nothing about why Pat was forced out of Intel.
My speculation:
* Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.
* Under Pat, Intel's roadmap was a mess. When you look at AMD's roadmap, it made a ton of sense, predictable, and there are rarely any delays or cancellations. When you looked at an Intel roadmap, expect 30% of them cancelled, 50% delayed by 1-2 quarters, and 30% switched to a different node tech.
* IFS strategy under Pat amounted to nothing. Fab cancellations or on hold. Cancelling 20A altogether. Not being able to woo any notable customers. Not hiring the right people for external customers. There were reports that he didn't know how to run an external fab, which is why the board decided to hire Lip Bu Tan who came from Cadence.
* He missed on AI boom, crypto boom, said AMD was in rear view mirror, politicized TSMC in order to win government grants while still still using TSMC nodes themself.
As others have noted, there was over hiring. I think part of it was driven by Pat’s desire to get governments to give subsidies but in retrospect, it led to too many empty shells being built and too many people getting hired. Intel Foundry eventually got Intel 18A node out and that is a promising node. However, the demand for it is now predicated on the AI boom continuing and TSMC being constrained for capacity. Once that goes away, who knows what happens for demand for non TSMC nodes.
Issuing a dividend is a terrible sign for the market. It's telling investors "we have so much money that we have no idea what to do with, please take some of it yourself and invest it somewhere other than Intel."
Have always felt stock buy-backs are equally terrible.
“We have all this money but we have no long term vision for how to grow the company. We’ll just keep doing what we’ve been doing prop up our share price instead”.
For a blue chip that's reliably issued one for years, it's also a major part of the reason to own the stock. Throwing that away will not have a good impact on the value even if it's justified.
But value is meaningless. The ultimate purpose for a producer in a market is to provide infinite value for no cost.
Of course that is a pipe dream, so it should provide the highest value for the lowest cost.
For those who want to argue it should be a balance: consider the opposite position. A producer should provide no value at infinite cost. In this case, everything withers. If party A and party B need each other's products to survive, they can do that when the value is infinite and the cost is zero, but not when the value is zero and the cost is infinite.
The last few decades have shown that giving the finger to the customer and going all in on shareholdermaxxing has nothing but terrible effects and is like sticking a spanner into the wheel of capitalism.
> Intel in 2019 had $72 billion in revenue and 110k employees. When he was fired in 2024, Intel had $54 billion in revenue and 124k employees. He also didn't cut dividend until 2024. He nearly put Intel into the grave in 3 years.
That's nonsense. Intel's problems were caused by falling behind TSMC, which was not the fault of Pat Gelsinger. Quite the contrary, he did a lot to turn things around, but this takes time, a lot more than three years.
They had far more problems than just falling behind TSMC. See my post here: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/revenue