[ckastner]

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

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.

[saguro]

The plea of stupidity in high profile insider trading cases is a smoke screen - that was my point.

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_...

[rando444]

How is that a convincing argument?

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?

[bobdole1234]

Intel has a never ending parade of security related bugs that get fixed and nobody cares.

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.

[rando444]

It's not just about security. These bugs are going to impact customers' performance by up to 30% or more and that can't be fixed. This is a huge deal for cloud providers' revenue.

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

[bobdole1234]

Well, since Google knew about this bug across the boundaries of a few quarterly reports so far, and hasn't signaled radical departures in their operational expenses, and has specifically said the impact on them was smaller than many expected [1]... I'd say we know the outcome already.

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

[rando444]

Knowing about the bug != having all of their systems patched.

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.

[bobdole1234]

Google said they've finished patching, and it was all done before the bug became public.

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.

[sokoloff]

Kozlowski is surely guilty of state sales tax evasion and seems to fit the pattern of did it "because 'Screw the state!' and I think I can get away with it".

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).

[noobermin]

It could have a lot to do with CEO's doing all sorts of similar things while getting away scott-free.

[fortythirteen]

Never underestimate anyone's ability to freak out and be a selfish dumbass.