The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lafont: Intel's decline stems from complete failure of corporate governance
“I think Intel really missed. It's a complete abdication of corporate governance at the board level and the CO levels.”
Gelsinger: Intel did not build a new factory for a decade
“It hadn't built a new factory in a decade when I got there.”
Gelsinger: Intel returned $100B to shareholders five years before his return
“In the five years five, six years before I came back, you know, Intel gave a hundred billion dollars to shareholders.”
Haas: TSMC's compounding manufacturing advantage makes catching up nearly impossible
“Once you fall behind in chips, it's very, very difficult to catch up because the cycle gets on top of you. TSMC now has the best fabs in the world. The leading edge companies, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, they all build a TSMC. TSMC gets better at what they're building…”
Khanna: Gelsinger cited capex and procurement, not permitting, for Intel struggles
“We asked Pat Gelsinger, who was asked to leave in Intel. And I said, is it, was it the permitting reform? And he said, no, it's that the capital expenditures to make Wall Street's numbers were, was very high and there was no, no procurement.”
Chamath: Intel spent over $100B on stock buybacks leaving $6B in cash
“Intel in twenty-twenty approved a share purchase plan where these guys had a hold of a hundred and ten billion dollars and have spent all of it except for 7.2 billion. They have six billion left on the balance sheet.”
Gelsinger: Tech companies must be run by technologists, not business executives
“Fundamentally this is a technology business and you need technologists running technology”
Gelsinger: TSMC produces seven times as many semiconductor wafers as Intel
“Five to one, and now it's more like seven to one in terms of wafers, you know, to TSMC to Intel.”
Haas: Intel competition drove Nvidia's early pivot to Arm architecture
“That was the genesis of starting to pivot to ARM in a very big way inside NVIDIA, because at that time, Jensen looked at what was going on with SoCs and ARM-based architecture and moved everybody on to the SoC program.”
Friedberg: Onshoring semiconductor manufacturing is financially irrational for Intel
“The rational capitalist decision is to offshore manufacturing for Intel. Yes. It is irrational for them from a business perspective, from a board perspective, from a fiduciary perspective, To onshore manufacturing.”
Gracias: Offshoring US chip manufacturing to TSMC was a terrible idea
“TSMC basically took the many, this idea of outsourcing manufacturing assets that Intel did with TSMC in the beginning, Created that business and moved most of our high technology and chips off and offshore into Taiwan. This is like a terrible idea.”
Gracias: US industrial policy is needed to reshore Intel and AMD manufacturing
“I think actually it's going to require industrial policy to force people like Intel, AMD to want to bring stuff back into the U.S., and to really get great talent to want to do it.”
Gelsinger: Steve Jobs secretly ported four Mac OS releases to x86
“And I remember that Steve said, I've been working on that the last four releases. He had been preparing the core technologies inside of Apple For something that might happen in the future, you know, and he was already, you know, to me, I just remember, I was j…”
Gelsinger: World would be different if Intel hadn't canceled Larrabee project
“In my first departure from Intel, the project was killed a week after I left. And the world would have been so much different.”