[bilbyx]

Stock price alone doesn't tell the full story. Pat Gelsinger was brought in to fix long-term structural issues at Intel - things like rebuilding its foundry competitiveness and securing leading-edge node capabilities. These aren't quick fixes and takes years to pay off. Yes, the TSMC discount issue hurt, but that also speaks to broader industry tensions and strategic missteps that predates Gelsinger. Letting him go before the turnaround had a chance to work seems shortsighted.

[ryao]

The stock lost 2/3 of its value under his tenure. After nearly 4 years and a minor recovery in the stock’s value that was reversed into a new 10+ year low for reasons that were almost entirely the CEO’s fault, I expect most boards of directors would lose confidence in the CEO and fire him.

Pat Gelsinger killed the royal cores project which handed CPU dominance to AMD. Without leadership in CPUs to keep the company going, there would be no Intel. They reportedly lost their entire Oregon design team to a startup developing RISC-V processors as a result of the cancellation, which will have repercussions for many years. Intel’s stock had been on a small recovery until Zen 5 made it clear that Intel could no longer compete with AMD CPUs on performance, which caused the stock to crater. The power management bugs that were killing nearly all of the high end rocket lake CPUs just prior to this also did not help, as they erased some of the gains during the recovery, before it was entirely wiped out by Intel’s lack of competitiveness against Zen 5. There was nothing in Intel’s pipeline to compete with Zen 5, because Gelsinger had cancelled the project that could compete with Zen 5.

The loss of the TSMC discount did not predate Gelsinger. TSMC pulled the discount directly in response to comments made by Gelsinger that they considered disrespectful. This became public knowledge. As I recall, there had been a rumor/leak around summer of 2024 that the board had been very unhappy about that.

While there were issues that predated Gelsinger, he did nothing to fix them. There is a great writeup on that here:

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/08/why-gelsinger-was-wr...

The only thing that predates Gelsinger that Gelsinger cannot be considered responsible for failing to fix is Intel’s reputation as an IP thief from the 80s and 90s. It is likely a major reason nobody wants to use Intel’s foundries.