| > Personally, I’ve heard nothing but bad things from Intel during Gelsinger’s tenure. He had some lofty ideas, I don't know if I can say he was doing a good or bad job - it's really hard to say. But were there good things about him that people say? He was the first CEO to say Intel was underpaying. He promised to raise pay, made a deal with the board to do so, and delivered. Most people got something like a 20% pay boost. Still not FAANG level, but compared to the prior CEOs who said "We pay fair market rates"... yeah, he won points with a lot of employees for that. He quickly banned stock buybacks. Throughout his tenure he focused on his Foundry plans and improving engineering practices, at the cost of share value. His plan was "Let's fix our fabs and our efficiency, get back to building world class products, and the financials will take care of themselves". As opposed to all his predecessors who did stock buybacks instead of investing the money into the company. He convinced the board to cut the dividend to a third of its value - because Intel was paying triple the dividends that its competitors paid. No doubt many didn't like declining stocks, but no one can argue he was trying to artificially prop up the share price. His overall compensation was low.[1] He didn't earn any of his performance based stocks, and didn't try to manipulate those prices for personal gain. In the end he made a little over $10m per year - that includes the severance pay and signing bonus. He was fairly good with transparency. He wanted the world to see the fab's financials when he knew they were poor. The point was to give the world a real number that could be used as a metric of how well Intel is doing. $8B loss this year, with the hope of breaking even in the next few years. This last thing is what probably got him fired because the stock tanked after that (I don't know why - everyone knew it was unprofitable...). Declining revenues are due to Intel products not competing. How much of that is Pat's fault - hard to say. Intel was making poor products for a while, and partly due to a poor fab process - which is precisely what Pat was trying to fix (5 nodes in 4 years is unprecedented, and it looks like Intel will achieve it). Lunar Lake was built on TSMC, and is a fairly decent product. Overall, the gap between AMD and Intel has shrunk. Finally, perhaps the reason people really hated him: The layoffs. But as is often pointed out on HN, if you compare Intel's headcount with comparable companies (AMD, Nvidia), you can see Intel is really wasteful. The revenue per person is much, much lower. You can compare just the Intel Products head count (excluding the fabs). The layoffs had to happen. And there have to be more if Intel wants to be competitive. It can no longer command high margins. So yeah, plenty hate him. But plenty do like him. > but he clearly wasn’t executing well with Intel’s bread and butter business. Nor were the previous two CEOs. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14... |