Some investors made a wrong bet and trying to save face in front of their clients - spending even more money of those clients on lawsuits

Nope, this isn’t being driven by any shareholders. The lawyers want a big payday and found a client of convenience. If they win they’ll ask the count for a percentage of the value of the judgment using an innumerate formula for value.

that's not how lawyers get paid, outside of the ones advertise on TV. They bill massive hours that gets paid off the top, and some of it even if they lose.

Not in this kind of case.

Individual gains, collectivized losses

No, everyone got paid who was working there. But if it'd worked, the profits would've been taxed. As it is, the losses are kept private.

Losses are always public, these investors will use the loss against gains and therefore will pay less taxes, reducing the amount of government revenue.

Yes, the government doesn't get to take your money if you made a loss. That's not the same as what you're implying. The investors lost.

Collectivized or public losses come into play when the government bails out failing companies so that shareholders don't get hosed for a bad investment. Shareholders getting hosed is the opposite of that; private loses.

In the US of A, in the land of free and brave, it's a crime if the stock price does not go up. Probably legal fees are very minor compared to losses and it would be bad fiduciary duty not to sue if there is even 1% chance to win by a miracle.

I don’t think it is accurate to think that the board must be involved for there to be merit. The board represents a totally different set of interests and priorities, many of which may even directly contradict and even clash with those of shareholders, even if they are shareholders themselves.

The nepotistic, incestuous, little club of boards and CEOs is almost hostile to shareholder interests once forward momentum stalls, at which point divergent priorities emerge.

If the board wants to remain in the board carousel club, they can’t be joining lawsuits against CEOs, when they often themselves are CEOs that frequent the same few exclusive clubs and triple gated communities and celebrate holidays at the same exclusive hotels. There is clearly a stratification there that you are either dismissing or are not aware of. Let me put it this way, the nobility will always hold to each other over any challenges from the merchant class, even if when everyone is making money, there is some mutually beneficial mingling.

> It didn't' work, that's not a crime. He left because his plan didn't work. That's what happens to CEO's who try and fail to implement a business plan.

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.

> We're all just waiting for Intel to give up on the Arc GPUs because of it.

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.

A lot of projects are "walk before you run". Didn't stop Intel from killing them and wasting all their time, money and effort. That's Intel's problem. I don't want them to kill Arc. It's what they need long-term. I simply don't believe they have the persistence and long-term vision to keep at it despite lackluster sales and lack of interest.

"AI accelerators" are at peak profitability right now. Within a few years, certainly by 2030, chip optimizations and improvements will see Raspberry Pis or your phone doing AI work.

I expect we may even aee AI cores on phones, by 2036.

Phones are already getting NPUs / TPUs / Neural Engines / whatever fancy marketing term they can come up with.

I think software optimizations are going to heavily impact gpu/ai-accelerator demand. It feels like we’re leaving the ‘brute force’ make it work era and entering the ‘make it work on my phone without killing battery life” era. I wouldn’t be shocked if within a few years there just isn’t the need for custom hardware at all.

Some phones have TPUs on them today...

Maybe you have insider knowledge but if you say you don't know - how do you know what the CEO leaving is a symptom of? (I don't know)

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.

> "but in 3.5 years couldn't do the actual goal"

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.

I don't think anything you said disagreed with me. I agree giving more time could've resulted in a good outcome. But he didn't do it in the time he was given and they didn't want to give him more time. It's just what it is. My point is that without more information it is hard to know if it'd have worked out.

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.

> But he didn't do it in the time he was given

Is that true? How long did they agree it would take originally?

5 node in 4 years. And we are just approaching end of 4 soon with 18A coming up. The first 4 node are already delivered on schedule. It remains to be seen where 18A will end up. But it isn't far off.

So I have no idea where "he didn't do it in time" came from.

Yep. The difference between persistence and stubbornness is the outcome.

> but in 3.5 years couldn't do the actual goal

...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.

Investment of cash without profits to make those investments is still a burn…

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.

> Investment of cash without profits to make those investments is still a burn…

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.

TBH 3.5 years is a fart in the wind for change in a company the size of Intel.

On the other hand it's around 7% of a regular person's career. I didn't intend the number to have some ulterior motive as I don't know how long it should take, it is what it is. But it was long enough for the board.

> Zero patience for anything that doesn't bring in billions and isn't immediately successful.

That reminds me a lot of Google

The explosive growth of so many tech companies has set the bar for everything in some investors minds. If it doesn’t go absolutely vertical it is a failure.

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.

The top businesses required many years, decades even, of heavy investments into physical infrastructure, including the things you listed plus data centers and global networking over land and under oceans.

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.

Well hopefully we don’t put anyone with a track record of bankrupting casinos in charge.

The people we elect represent the zeitgeist. Trump is about attention trolling and gambling.

Ironically I think this is the nail in the coffin.

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.

Intel is strategically important corporation.

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.

>Sacking the CEO, throwing him under the bus, and then publicly demanding salary back just reflects really badly on Intel.

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.

Whatever Intel is now, is the direct outcome of poor leadership by Pat Gelsinger. That was his entire job, and he failed.

Do you think Intel would have done better with him than without him?

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..

If these guys cant use the SEC whistleblower bounty program then there isn't a case

This is just something petty

> If these guys cant use the SEC whistleblower program then there isn't a case

I think you are confusing a few things.

The whistleblower program is for insiders. This lawsuit is being brought by outside shareholders. This has nothing at all to do with whistleblowers as there aren't insiders with insider knowledge.

This suit is being brought by outsiders who are unhappy with Intel's performance.

There is no insider here trying to expose anything.

You don’t have to be an insider, independent researchers have pointed out irregularities, improperly disclosed things and won bounties

Yeah good luck hiring next CEO to Intel.

The “risk” is based on alternatives and what gaining a reputation as a failure if you join a sinking ship at a company going through CEO’s quickly does to your future prospects.

These boards want proven superstars for many reasons and there’s a limited pool. Basically suppose you’re faced with a choice between a low risk CEO position that pays 5m/year you could do for the next 10+ years at a stable company and Intel who is most likely going to dump you. How much are you asking Intel per year, and how much do you want if they decide to terminate your contract for failing at achieving unrealistic goals in an unrealistic timeframe?

Those golden parachutes are often the result of an overly friendly board, but in some cases they are more easily justified.

What a load of crap. CEOs don't get fired, they step down to "spend time with their family".

A lot of them serially run companies into the ground too, and don't have any problems getting appointed.

I’m not sure if you’re joking but just in case…

Sometimes CEO’s, politicians, etc use phrases that don’t necessarily mean what a literal interpretation of them would suggest.

It is the risk that you won’t be able to convince one of the handful of people capable of understanding the most technologically advanced manufacturing processes in the world, having the right connections in the industry, to lead a culture change to right a ship.

Also, Gelsinger did not get $100M+.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...

Tbf most of this is out of the hands of the CEO, outside the delusions of MBAs

And outside the delusions of random internet commenters, businesses that fail to pay market prices for quality labor, especially at the cutting edge, do not succeed. Whether it be CEO or IC electrical engineer/software developer.

That is one of the reasons Intel is where it is, overpaying for MBA talent and underpaying for engineering talent. A person capable of turning around Intel could easily get work at another tech company earn millions with far less risk and far less publicity. Intel needs some of the smartest people in the US working for them, it should have had the reputation of being among the highest paying employers.

CEOs aren't paid for they're labor (as if they're even capable of labor!). They're paid to be a liable wad of meat.

Why not just invest in a company where the CEO and board take no salary to begin with?

They exist.

Wouldn’t be relevant here, as there are no CEOs anywhere who don’t take compensation.

If they’d been taking their compensation as stock grants then they’d want that back instead.

Many founder CEOs take little or no salary or direct compensation for their jobs. Owning a big percentage of the stock is enough motivation to make the company more valuable.

Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Jack Dorsey have all at times taken $1 annual salaries.

But Zuckerberg still received more than 24 million in benefits from Meta. Another bluff. It is like saying you have 1$ salary while company is covering all your personal expenses.

Actually it will be better, more transparent if he received 24M salary instead of using benefits and bragging about $1.

I guess that's very tax-efficient too.

Wasn't that all security

It seems so, in so far as that it’s roughly the same as the number in this 2021 article.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-se....

Note that is a pretty comfortable form of security, including jets.

I'm sure you can call everything a security expense.

I need a secure housing. I need a secure meal. I need a secure car, jet, yacht. I need a secure sweatpants...

Owning company stock or getting a salary doesn't really matter in this case. Both are compensation.

People also get up in arms on stock grants. Look at the recent Musk case. Regardless of what you think of Musk, any TSLA investor should be ecstatic with what he did with the stock. He took most of his salary in stock and now they want it back. The main reason the numbers sound big is because the stock grew so much.

It has nothing to do with motivation.

They have $1 salary and then get a ton of dividends or sell stock (both of which are taxed at waay lower rate than salary)

So they are very well compensated at all times.

I honestly don’t understand why they like to mention this $1 bs all the time.

Don't forget Jeff Bezos – he took 80k/year the whole time he was CEO of Amazon.

If I was the owner of Amazon I would also "pay myself" $1. It doesn't make any difference.

Yes, that is the point being made.

Interesting.

Which boards take no salary?

up or down?