If you bought one shared near the end of 1998, you would have paid around $30. That share would be worth around $22 now. So, you would have gained around $9 not accounting for reinvestment of dividends.

Not a good return on investment, in comparison, but you picked 1998 in the middle of the dot com boom. If you picked the end of 1995, you'd have paid $7 and have around $40 today, which isn't too much worse of a return than the S&P 500.

This isn't to say Intel hasn't been poorly managed, by the way.

If you bought $10,000 of INTC in Sept 19th, 1998 and held it to today the stock would be worth $17,000 and you would've collected almost $12,000 in dividends.

Is pretty good.

That's still crap. The only way you'd be in decent shape is if you took the dividends and invested those in any of INTC's competitors.

If you didn't reinvest the dividends you'd be ahead, though. Which is kind of ironic - but you'd have taken out a fair bit of money from 2016-2022 when the price was high.

AMD starting to execute properly only made their headaches that much worse, but they had been far too fat for too long.

And had they stuck with XScale it I don't think it would be surprising if they ended up in Qualcomm's current position (default high-end ARM CPU maker). Yet they consciously decided to throw it all away..

They also had a stock split in 2000, and I’m not sure the parent comment is accounting for that.

But the amount of Folks that comment on these Mergers & Acquisitions(M&A) sorts of articles and the US regulations regarding M&As and the main litmus test for rejection there being if that Acquisition will reduce the competitive landscape of Intended market players that compete in that market!

And So Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and previous Windows on ARM Laptop/PC products are more direct competition to Intel's/AMD's Windows on x86 products! Linux on ARM as well, as Tuxedo Laptops(Linux OS Based OEM) is planning on releasing a Snapdragon X Elite Linux OS based laptop!

That and Intel only controls the IP surrounding the x86 32 bit/Earlier 16/8 bit parts of the x86 ISA while AMD's the IP owner of the x86 64 bit ISA extensions! But Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement between them for their respective parts of the x86 ISA IP rights and so Intel has no legal right to transfer AMD's x86 64 bit ISA extensions License to any third party and ditto for AMD and any of the 32 bit earlier parts of the x86 ISA that are Intel's IP.

Qualcomm or any other competitor in the CPU/dGPU market will not be able to get past the regulators easily and Nvidia can not acquire Intel because of Intel's Discrete GPU market presence where Intel's ARC/Later Discrete GPUs are a welcome 3rd player attempt at the low end to mainstream dGPU market place Competition against AMD and Nvidia!