Intel to lay off around 15,000 staff as they try make $10 billion in savings

Quoting: sprocket

Quoting: JarmerEVERYONE SHOULD REPEAT THIS AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE:

CEO Pat Gelsinger made $17 million in 2023 alone. That was a 45% raise from his 2022 salary of $12 million. This asshole took almost a 50% raise (what normal person ever gets anywhere close to that), laughed, turned around, and fired THOUSANDS of people.

If the company you are leading has to cut 15k people because of insane ramblings like "revenue has not grown as expected" then surely he will take a 90% cut next year, right? RIGHT?

I work for Intel.

Believe me, us employees are not going to be quiet about this.

Good!! I hope you survived the 15k, and also hope that you all can get together and make some impactful change.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, good luck, eh?

Purple Library Guy…
A fellow Canadian maybe?
I felt like most users on here were from across the pond 😂

Quoting: Pyrate

Quoting: sprocket

Quoting: PyrateGuess they're too busy powering genocidal rogue states.

You definitely aren't wrong about this.

At his point on the internet, I actually can't tell if it's sarcasm or you're being genuine. You being an employee there I guess you could have more insight, so I'd like to know if you know more about this.

Even if he did, he wouldn't share that information on an open forum like this anyways.

Quoting: ToddL

Quoting: Pyrate

Quoting: sprocket

Quoting: PyrateGuess they're too busy powering genocidal rogue states.

You definitely aren't wrong about this.

At his point on the internet, I actually can't tell if it's sarcasm or you're being genuine. You being an employee there I guess you could have more insight, so I'd like to know if you know more about this.

Even if he did, he wouldn't share that information on an open forum like this anyways.

Not exactly the most well-kept secret out there, but yeah I wouldn't risk it myself, especially with who we're dealing with here; you're right.

Quoting: Woodlandor

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, good luck, eh?

Purple Library Guy…
A fellow Canadian maybe?

Why yes. Vancouver. Although I have to admit, I think the use of "eh" has declined quite a bit over the years . . . or maybe it's still more current in the East?

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: ZlopezI'm not sure why companies are taking growth for granted. Why they won't rather work with what they made the current year and expect that the next year will be the same or maybe save some of the money for bad times if you are making more than you expected, so you have some reserves.

The stock market doesn’t work that way. It’s cool and useful or sometimes necessary, but it is also cancer.

Yep, major source of these issues are the shift from long term investment where people invested in companies and held on to them for years on end (and got rich on the constant but stable dividends) to the more modern "lets buy and sell the same share within a few milliseconds" that drives the demand for infinite growth.

Short-termism is a big problem, but I actually think it's not the millisecond thing that's the biggest. It's the this-quarter thing, where the big objective is to hand out lots of dividends and share buybacks right now. CEOs have a lot of stock themselves, not to mention a lot of options, and they're fairly footloose, so they tend to be motivated to goose the price in the short term, not grow in the long. Plus, shareholding tends to be more concentrated, so you get "activist shareholders" (read: Blackrock) exerting a lot of power and wanting the money now. In the end, after all the dividends and these days especially buybacks, there isn't much left for investing in the business. Some big corporations actually borrow money to spend on share buybacks.

I think a big reason actually is low taxes--particularly low corporate taxes, but also of course low taxes on capital gains for rich people with loopholes available. No, I know the corporate types whine on and on about how high corporate taxes would depress investment, but if you look at the actual mechanisms I don't think it works that way. Remember that corporate taxes are on profits, not revenue. So, say I've got this big corporation, and it made a billion dollars after normal expenses.
Scenario A: It pays no tax on that billion, so if it wants to it can pass the whole thing, untaxed, to the shareholders. Well then why not do it?
Scenario B: It pays 50% tax on that billion. Well now, suddenly it might make a bit more sense, rather than passing only half a billion to the shareholders, instead invest a lot of that billion in the business instead of paying tax on it--upgrade capital equipment, do some R&D and so on. With that high tax on profits, shareholders might in the end get a better return on investment by reducing the declared profits by investing in the business, because that way you get to invest all the money rather than just the after tax money.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 August 2024 at 11:37 pm UTC

It's all just a symptom of a capitalist system that is totally and utterly broken and incentivizing the polar opposite for what a company needs to succeed.

Between your damning comment which I think is spot on, and the damning WSJ articles that just keep coming out, I honestly don't have much faith in intel to do any kind of turnaround of ............. anything at all. They'll just keep doing short term shoot-themselves-in-the-foot moves to pacify the broken wall street incentives, and slowly just crumble away. All titans fall, and Intel sure was a titan at some point, but that point has long passed, and now it appears we may be in the late years of an elderly company unable to adapt to current market trends, or even manage to stand up on it's own.

Sure, Intel may still to this day hold a huge chunk of the present market, but I still don't believe that means anything for long term. Markets are shifting at an insanely rapid pace around the world, and intel is like a sloth covered in molasses who's been darted by a tranquilizer.


Last edited by Jarmer on 4 August 2024 at 1:22 pm UTC

As of yesterday I am no longer an Intel user. My laptop broke beyond repair and my new laptop has an AMD processor. I've been using an AMD-based desktop for a few years already.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: ZlopezI'm not sure why companies are taking growth for granted. Why they won't rather work with what they made the current year and expect that the next year will be the same or maybe save some of the money for bad times if you are making more than you expected, so you have some reserves.

The stock market doesn’t work that way. It’s cool and useful or sometimes necessary, but it is also cancer.

Yep, major source of these issues are the shift from long term investment where people invested in companies and held on to them for years on end (and got rich on the constant but stable dividends) to the more modern "lets buy and sell the same share within a few milliseconds" that drives the demand for infinite growth.

Short-termism is a big problem, but I actually think it's not the millisecond thing that's the biggest. It's the this-quarter thing, where the big objective is to hand out lots of dividends and share buybacks right now. CEOs have a lot of stock themselves, not to mention a lot of options, and they're fairly footloose, so they tend to be motivated to goose the price in the short term, not grow in the long. Plus, shareholding tends to be more concentrated, so you get "activist shareholders" (read: Blackrock) exerting a lot of power and wanting the money now. In the end, after all the dividends and these days especially buybacks, there isn't much left for investing in the business. Some big corporations actually borrow money to spend on share buybacks.

I think a big reason actually is low taxes--particularly low corporate taxes, but also of course low taxes on capital gains for rich people with loopholes available. No, I know the corporate types whine on and on about how high corporate taxes would depress investment, but if you look at the actual mechanisms I don't think it works that way. Remember that corporate taxes are on profits, not revenue. So, say I've got this big corporation, and it made a billion dollars after normal expenses.
Scenario A: It pays no tax on that billion, so if it wants to it can pass the whole thing, untaxed, to the shareholders. Well then why not do it?
Scenario B: It pays 50% tax on that billion. Well now, suddenly it might make a bit more sense, rather than passing only half a billion to the shareholders, instead invest a lot of that billion in the business instead of paying tax on it--upgrade capital equipment, do some R&D and so on. With that high tax on profits, shareholders might in the end get a better return on investment by reducing the declared profits by investing in the business, because that way you get to invest all the money rather than just the after tax money.

I added the millisecond part to make it the other extreme from the long term type of investments where people tended to hold on to their shares for life (like say Warren Buffet) but ofc the situation is far more complex and diverse then just a simple matter of the hold time. E.g even such a thing as share buybacks is not really something negative, but then you have those companies that abuse them, even the leveraged buybacks (aka when you use debt to perform the buyback) is not normally really negative but companies have abused them to the brink of now having to actually borrow money to perform them. So what is really missing here is regulation to allow things like this to happen when it's good and prohibit it when it is being abused.

And you are 100% correct on the tax thing, ofc they will always complain that the tax is too high but then they would do that even if the tax rate was 0%. And increasing taxation on buybacks and dividends would be part of the "we need more regulation".

But then our entire current capitalist system is built as if growth is infinite, e.g on how money is created in banks when people lend money which leads to the situation that there will always be more total debt than total amount of money so the cycle have to continue in perpetuum or it collapses.

Keeping the employees would mean sharing the profits (their work created) with them. We can't have that.