Otellini started the trend of not properly reinvesting money in the company, in particular near the end of his tenure. He could be blamed for not getting into smartphones/tablets, but it's difficult to say even with hindsight whether that would have worked well or not. I think the only 'smart' move in that respect would have been to shift toward a foundry model to service that market.
BK is at fault for Intel's current state. He sold the board on a promise of capturing tablets and smartphones and basically gave away the chips for free to try and make it happen. It might have happened if they were willing to continue for long enough, but instead it was abandoned too soon to see any return on the investment. At that point he had no idea what else to do and hence started pumping the stock with buybacks. Couple that with his background in manufacturing management leading him to believe that he knew better than the engineers and you had the recipe for 10nm and beyond. He also setup Sapphire Rapids for failure with the decision to skimp on proper pre-silicon validation.
Bob Swan was fine with letting BK's mismanagement continue to strangle Intel to death. After all, times were good and profits could be used to pump the stock price via buybacks. On the order of $13B a year of stock buybacks. Just think if even half that money had been reinvested in, ya know, manufacturing and R&D.
Pat Gelsinger attempted to put Intel back on course. And it's 100% incorrect to claim that he missed AI - he invested properly in it, he just made the mistake of trusting the middle management to do what they said they were going to. Recall that Gelsinger was the one who identified the future threat of NVIDIA and pushed through Larrabee as a competitor.... for which he was ousted because it didn't produce results in a timely fashion. Had that side project received proper funding and support today's landscape may well look very different. When he finally got his chance at CEO Intel was in far, far worse shape than when he'd left. But he actually set about correcting much of the damage which BK and Swan had done. Only problem being that he was spending on the fab side at a rate to make up for over a decade of neglect and the current financials couldn't support that. And again, he wasn't as aggressive at clearing out the middle management as he should have been... which was a problem because the culture of said middle management had become one of overpromise and underdeliver.
LBT is currently in the process of destroying what remains of Intel. His initial claims were right on, giving cause for optimism. But unfortunately his actions don't match up. The layoffs have been almost entirely on the individual contributor level, middle management is practically untouched. And you'll recall the press release from a few months ago of hiring certain experts that were supposed to fix everything... aka hire more middle management. As has already been pointed out, the general sentiment regarding his RTO mandate is that it's moronic and will simply drive away individual contributors who valued that flexibility and have zero reason to go into an office. (I've heard plenty of stories of top performers who are being told to go into an office despite the fact that no one they work with is in that office.) Another example of his stupidity is mandating a return of SMT to the design because data center customers want it before the 'performance' core data center variants without SMT have even been provided to said customers. Basically, if he stays I don't expect Intel to survive as I see no reason not to expect the bad decisions to continue. One definitely could make the argument that he wants Intel to fail in order for his Walden International investments to pay off.
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