That's a red herring. Krzanich had no idea how badly the news would impact the stock. He may have well overestimated it in his mind and chose to sell. Just because he didn't make huge gains from the possible insider trading, doesn't preclude the possibility of insider trading occurring.

So the whole argument here is:

1) Krzanich couldn't be possibly stupid enough to do this.

2) He didn't make a ton of money so it's a stupid plan, he could't possibly be stupid enough to do this.

Weak.

Seeing as he made to the the role of CEO of Intel Corp., I find that to be a very convincing argument.

I have to concede that there's precedent even for CEOs of huge corporations to be that stupid and/or criminal, most notably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kozlowski.

Highly successful executives engage in insider trading quite frequently (see link). When they do, they take a calculated risk. You can be quite sure that none of them are stupid in any sense of the word. They take a measured risk and some succeed and some fail, depending on luck, skill, ambitions, and how big/rich they already are. From what little I know, doing it in a an open manner is actually the best best way to go about insider trading. If you attempt to skirt around it by doing anything shady like having friends/relatives execute the trades for you, the evidence is undeniable once discovered. If you go about it 'openly' and instead rely on blurry interpretation or your ability to plead ignorance or put the timeline into question, it's a lot harder to nail you.

There are many cases of brazen broad-daylight insider trading, such as Donald Trump right now. Only the ones that end in successful legal action go on to be considered stupid. Even when they do get caught, a lot of the time the penalties are relatively lax, like suspended or weekend sentences for first time offenders.

So no, just because he is successful as an executive at a major corporation doesn't at all make it 'stupid' for him to engage in insider trading. That line of reasoning is a diversion from the facts of the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_SEC_enforcement_...

You honestly believe that Intel as a company kept all information about these serious vulnerabilities from the CEO for 5+ months? And nobody got fired for this?

This isn't meaningfully likely to affect any of the contracts that Intel has with it's major customers, and it's not like competition is going to spring forth in a meaningful way because of this bug.

It's not like he sold his stock while the company was secretly on fire and about to collapse.

The class action lawsuits are only just being filed within the past few days.

If you already know the outcome of these lawsuits, you should probably contact the lawyers and judges to let them know. /s

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16851132/meltdown-spectre-...

Also, I shouldn't have to point this out, but not everyone runs the same systems in the same fashion.

Lastly not only has everyone not patched their systems yet, but patches for many people don't even exist at this point:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/intel-ces/

I'm not trying to say it's going to be the worst case scenario, but I am saying it's extremely foolish to pretend that you can predict anything until people actually start patching their systems.

Time will tell, and it's best in every scenario to refrain from making gigantic blanket assumptions based on almost no data points.

That means the people who have the best information about mitigating this issue have a fix that apparently has minimal performance impacts on their cloud workloads, and I suspect their cloud customer SLO's would be taking a shitkicking if that weren't actually true.

Could Google not just have found a mitigation with non-negligible performance impact, and made a behind the scenes change to the actual hardware resources assigned at each vCPU level to mask the average impact, eating the cost in the short term (while evening it out in the long term by delaying price decreases they would otherwise implement)?

They've had a lot more time with the problem than anyone else has, and billions of dollars to gain by solving it better than anyone else.

If they had a 15-30% loss of performance in their 3+GW of infrastructure, it would almost certainly cause a significant dip in their quarterly results, and they would want to warn the markets about that well in advance to soften the blow.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/11/google-claims-its-spectre-...

Most of the rest of his story seems more like sour grapes than any criminal conduct to the detriment of Tyco investors.

Peter Chang is probably a better model for insider trading criminal CEO (as opposed to merely CEO criminal).

Insider trading is trading with the knowledge of privileged information not available to public investors. If he did it, it's a crime. Doesn't matter if he made $50 million or $5.

Their CEO has a well-documented six-year history of acquiring and disposing INTC stock. As the CEO, he implicitly always has access to privileged information. How exactly does the SEC determine the legality of a specific trade?

I'm not trying to be flip here, I don't really have an opinion on the matter. It just seems that when the CEO is allowed to apparently buy/sell as they please, and not on a predetermined announced-in-advance plan, you could argue that every single trade was illegal insider trading.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-a...

Which I find amusing. This is just one of the many places where legality of an action greatly depends on consensus and established practices, which can change overnight. For example court ruling based on implicitness of access to privileged information would effectively eliminate high ranking officers from trading altogether.

That's a VERY different question to a binary "is it insider trading?"

It’s possible to put an advance order in place to sell shares on a plan, which clears the issue because that decision is made in advance.

Wouldn't that reasonably make any sale, at any time, illegal?

Or, alternately, when would a CEO not possess (non-public) material information?

That's what he did, no?

Edit: The date on the last part is wrong, which doesn't change the fact that he changed his orders in the time between internal and public disclosure of Meltdown. I misread the article, in 2017 he issued his orders in February not June (2015).

Two major points

(1) Intel was informed in June. His stock sale was planned in October and executed in November.

You'd have to believe that somehow the CEO was not informed about this vulnerability during this huge time period.

(2) This wasn't a normal executive stock sale. He dumped all of his shares other than the required minimum holdings. The vulnerabilities aside, this just looks bad in general.

I'll give you that this plan seems pretty unimpressive. I just have a very hard time buying the idea that Intel kept him in the dark all those months and that him dumping all of the stock he possibly could is some sort of coincidence.

Technically this was a normal executive sale. He is holding the required shares and is the second largest inside shareholder after Andy Bryant, the chairman. In general INTC executives own very little stock. I have been somewhat bearish on INTC for a variety of reasons and now I will add what appears to be the lack of insider ownership to that list.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/holders?p=INTC

To reach that scenario you'd have to have engineers lying to their bosses about what they're working on, or managers hiding information from executives.

It's possible, but I don't buy it.