Do you guys think that private equity is the biggest threat now? I look at what they are doing, and it checks most of the boxes for vulture capitalism 101.
So pretty OT, but you're a Mod...
The moment the US finds itself in (and the UK) which is consuming everything else within our borders is that back in the 80s we embraced this utopian notion (neoliberalism) that markets could be tuned to be a perfectly functioning machine, largely free from government interference, that would produce prosperity because computers could now measure economic performance and models built to find the Pareto optimal set of decisions to make and executives would then do that and everything would stay in equilibrium. Our political parties swallowed that idea along with most of our corporations. And it turns out, that notion isn't correct for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that other countries don't need to sign onto that utopian idea and operate that way. This is why the US accuses other countries of cheating because they never signed on. Taiwan puts a lot of government intervention around TSMC. Less money now, but they build infrastructure, they help ensure talent can be hired, they help ensure adjacent industries are supporting rather than undercutting TSMC, etc. China is doing the same thing. Japan did as well, and South Korea as well.
Intel is trying to operate in this supposedly hands-off economy where Taiwan and TSMC are hands on. They aren't seeking market equilibrium through some mathematical model, they're seeking it by having the government support the company. And the US doesn't do that. We were able to go so far as a quasi-competitive grant model in the CHIPS act, but you don't see the government doing any of the things I've suggested - let's steer DOD dollars to ensure we have leading node ITAR production, let's have the fabless US companies take a stake in Intels success, etc. That's all anathema to the US, but that's precisely what China or Taiwan would do.
There really isn't anything that Intel can do to fix this because the US has this flawed economic ideology that both Democrats and Republicans have pursued for decades. Trump is breaking from that ideology, but in a bad way - creating a fascist command and control economy around markets where he can call for CEOs to step down arbitrarily, he can dictate how they do their hiring, what shows they put on the air, favor or punish using tariffs based on if they give him the right bauble or not, and so on. Intel was pretty screwed a year ago under the previously mostly hands-off economic philosophy and they're totally screwed now with the hands-on fascist one unless they can replace the CEO with someone out of Trumps central casting playbook to go give him the right bauble that will get him to do a sensible interventionist policy around the company (which I would argue Trump is unable to do because while his policies do seem to vaguely resemble some good economic policies they are so poorly implemented that they undermine that goal and wind up just being personal wins and losses on a board).
Vulture capitalism is the natural byproduct of a hands-off economic system with a belief that markets will find equilibrium, because those individuals aren't interested in finding equilibrium, they're interested in getting infinitely wealthy. They just aren't on board with the plan, and the philosophy assumes everyone is on board with the plan (this is why Soviet style communism failed as it was the same utopian ideology but surrounding workers and the politburo creating a perfect economic plan, rather than mathematical economics doing that.) China escaped that trap somewhat by giving capitalism a go, but only where it was beneficial to the government, and reserving the right to execute the vulture capitalists if they strayed from the plan. So Intel isn't doing vulture capitalism so much as they're recognizing the systemic economic failure of the US the same as all of the other fabless companies have done - spin off the x86 business as a fabless one, since we know that can work, strip the foundry business back to only that which can make money and hope that someone finds utility in it. It's an admission that the volume of the design business isn't sufficient to prop up the foundry, and that the foundry isn't stable enough to bring in the scale of customers needed to keep it profitable, and it needs a non-market solution to save. Maybe the feds, maybe someone like Apple who has that kind of cash will see some non-economic benefit. It's not like it's a different decision that what AMD made when they yeeted GF off, Intel was just bigger and could survive the ship leaking for longer.
Basically they're just screwed. I suspect the highly interventionist Trump admin isn't smart enough to salvage this. And I'm skeptical the Democrats have realized that their (and the GOPs) economic philosophy has completely failed and are wiling to embrace a new one - though Warren seems to have recognized it, and so even if Intel can keep the foundry afloat to 2028 and Democrats get elected, my guess is they're not going to come in with a radical new economic vision. Maybe this will go sideways badly enough that they can get there, but I suspect that would also serve to kill Intel in the process.