It's very easy to say that the CEO was trying for real and everyone else was against him as he is an engineer so it feels good to say it, but is there truth to the fact that it's just lack of patience and "shortsighted" thinking by the board, or is that just what people repeat because it sounds good to say?
Pat was there from Feb 2021 to Dec 2024. In that time he fired 5k+ people (https://www.warntracker.com/company/intel) and now had plans to fire 15k more. We can also look at earnings during his tenure, I don't need to tell you when he joined because you'll know from looking at this: https://m.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/INTC/intel/eps-earni...
So in my simple view, we have a guy that came in with an ambitious plan to burn many billions, fire a bunch of people and turn the company around. He did the first two but in 3.5 years couldn't do the actual goal, and was just starting to present some kind of phase two with more layoffs and potentially more burning of money. Plus all the million factors people on the outside wouldn't know. So what we know is the plan wasn't working yet at least, but who knows if it ever will.
it's only shortsighted if you interrupt a good plan, if you interrupt a bad one you are a visionary.
For a very long time, i.e. for a few years, the actual goal had been announced as planned to be achieved towards the end of 2025, when the CMOS fabrication process Intel 18A should become usable for the mass production of Intel server CPUs and laptop CPUs.
If Pat Gelsinger had remained the CEO of Intel, only in 1 year from now it would have become possible to decide whether he has been a good CEO or a bad CEO.
Now, after he has been ousted prematurely, nobody will ever be able to say with certainty whether Pat Gelsinger would have succeeded to redress the fate of Intel or not. Since he has become CEO, all the intermediate milestones towards the stated goal have been achieved in time, even if with various problems, which were nevertheless more or less predictable, because in the past Intel has never been able to do better than this when transitioning to new fabrication processes and new product architectures.
While he has diminished the earnings for shareholders, that was a very good thing to do, because before him Intel has wasted huge amounts of money by giving them to the shareholders instead of using them wisely to remain a competitive company.
Instead of looking at shareholder earnings, you should look at the revenues of the Intel employees. I do not know if this is true, but another poster on this forum has said that Gelsinger has given a raise after becoming CEO, attempting to correct the situation where Intel is well known as a company that provides inadequate compensations to its employees, and he had promised that he will try in the future to improve this. If that is true, it has been something much more valuable than attempting to please the shareholders who have lead the company towards losing its competitivity in the market.
It's very appealing for an engineer as myself to root for an engineer CEO that comes back and turns it around, I know it's a story that everyone would love, that's why when the defence is only that, I suspect that people may just be romanticizing the situation the same way I would / do.
I'm also not sure someone saying "I need X time" means the board needs to treat this as some holy proclamation. A lot of the CEO job is also convincing the board and the markets that the change is coming and at 3.5 out of 5 years I guess the board still wasn't convinced and the markets certainly don't seem to be pricing in a turnaround.
Is that true? How long did they agree it would take originally?
So I have no idea where "he didn't do it in time" came from.
...which means he was allowed to release maybe 1 if even that of Intel's bread and butter, CPUs. They have a lead time of somewhere between 3-5 years. And that's not including fab development, which takes even longer.
So was he "burning billions" or was he investing billions into what made Intel a dominant force in the first place? We'll probably never know, but 3.5 years isn't anywhere close to long enough in this industry.
Pat still deserved longer. Intel is basically a storied brand that needs to be run like a startup because all of its legacy revenue products/models are dying.
there was, though? That's why net income averaged zero, and cash on hand is flat the last 4 years. He didn't run Intel at a loss.
Well yh, when you're being paid a normal wage. In USA that sounds like maybe $200k for proven senior engineers? So, just return anything they took above that - which I'm guessing is going to round to the full wage.
Honestly, I don't really understand why the people are taking so much more than their share even when successful.
I'm sure all kinds of radical cost cutting is being proposed internally, but I'd be surprised if this was on the line. My thinking is that Arc GPUs are the "walk before you run" product that will lead to Intel producing AI accelerators, which is a reasonable bet re: a pathway to profitability.
I expect we may even aee AI cores on phones, by 2036.
That reminds me a lot of Google
Unfortunately this rules out everything that involves anything physical (factories, cars, planes, fabs, etc.) and anything requiring research.
In the end it leads to an economy that chases fads and devolves into a pure casino.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The only one that sort of went vertical was Meta, but even they had to build tons of data centers and networking infrastructure.
Pushing the whole company towards 18A as soon as possible made a lot of sense. Arc made a lot of sense (as it becomes competitive when you get to 18A). We’re not there yet.
Sacking the CEO, throwing him under the bus, and then publicly demanding salary back just reflects really badly on Intel.
I don’t know the details of what’s happened behind the scenes and if there was any impropriety, that being said:
Intel under Pat was in a bad place, but it wasn’t a public clown show.
Because they were basically doing nothing for 5-10 years. How long do you think it would take to fix a company like that? I mean I'm not necessarily defending Gelsinger but throwing away the entire board and most of upper management would have been be the first step if they were about changing anything..
Investors know that.
They want to keep extracting profits, knowing that when (not if) things go dogshit (even more so than today), the public will bail them out. Since this CEO worked on other stupid things like long term technical viability, instead of pursuing the higher priority (investor returns), he was shown the way out.
2008 was an eye opening year for a lot of rich people.
Now that shines a new light. Not sure where you have this idea but definitely some food for thought.
Basically someone doesn't like Pat. I wouldn't be surprised if it was ex-Intel Board members.
We don't know that it didn't work. We also don't know that selling it off would've been significantly better, so it's weird to pretend that keeping the foundry part of Intel was this big failure. Intel is a cargo ship that doesn't turn on a dime. But the board and investors don't have the patience for long-term strategy that could get Intel out of its downward spiral. The CEO leaving is just another symptom of that, and a sign that Intel is just continuing to dig its own grave, damn the consequences. Just look at all the other projects Intel has tried and failed in the past 20ish years. Zero patience for anything that doesn't bring in billions and isn't immediately successful.
We're all just waiting for Intel to give up on the Arc GPUs because of it.