Pat Gelsinger: Former Intel CEO on What Went Wrong, What's Next + Lovable CEO on the Real Promise of Vibe Coding

The conversation opens by framing Intel as "Probably one of the greatest American companies ever", a company that then went off the rails and lost ground to Nvidia, TSMC and, to a certain extent, Apple. The stated aim is a post-mortem: what went right, what the critical mistakes were, and what should have changed in the company's direction.

The guest describes a 34-year association with Intel that began at age 18. The guest names Grove, Noyes (as transcribed), Barrett and Gordon Moore as mentors and calls them deeply technical leaders. As evidence of that culture, the guest recalls that on first joining the executive staff, probably 15 of the 20 people in the room held PhDs.

I went through puberty at Intel, right?

The central diagnosis is that Intel went off the rails when it started to be run by business people rather than technical people. In the discussion these are "the bean counters, the finance people." The guest says that on becoming CEO (the year is transcribed as 2001), they were the first technical leader in essentially 15 years. The guest also argues that this compounds, because business leaders promote business leaders. The comparison is with today's great technology companies, which the guest describes as deeply technical and typically founder-led. Sacha (as transcribed) and Sundar are given as examples of leaders who are not founders but are deeply technical.

you don't do that through a spreadsheet

The guest backs this up with capital allocation. In the five or six years before the return, Intel gave $100 billion to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. The guest wishes that money had stayed on the balance sheet. Intel had not built a new factory in a decade, and the guest asks how the company could fail to buy EUV machines. The conversation also raises the iPhone chips Intel passed on. The guest's point is that some of these investments only make sense to a technologist, because their economics on their own did not look good.

What I wouldn't have done for another $100 billion on the balance.

The conclusion is that a technology business needs technologists at the top, and that they in turn hire technologists to the staff and then the best technologists below them. The discussion links this to taking big swings at categories that could matter in the future. The same critique is then applied to Apple. The conversation says Apple has spent the past 15 years on buybacks and large dividends, calls it the largest holder of capital of any company (with an "I believe" hedge), and says it has made only small acquisitions on the margins. The largest is said to be Beats, bought for inroads into demographic segments such as the Android space. The conversation calls this "a colossal waste of time" given what the capital could have done.

Asked whether Steve Jobs's decision around 2008–2009 to make Apple's own silicon was a covert project, the guest describes Jobs as an incredible but ruthless and very difficult leader and mentions many conversations with him over the years. Apple's move to Intel with the Centrino chip was a big deal. Apple then made extraordinary demands: smaller chips and lower power. When Jobs was no longer convinced Intel could keep delivering, he started the project. Apple bought small companies (transcribed as "p semi") and built a few small chips internally, which at first was not a big deal. The chips gradually grew, and the guest calls Jobs a master of starting small efforts to build core competence inside the company.

The supporting anecdote concerns moving Apple's operating system from the Power chip to Intel. Intel was proud of its compiler and operating-system expertise and offered to help port the OS to x86. Jobs replied that Apple had already been doing that for four releases. The guest remembers being shocked that Apple had been preparing core technologies for something that might happen in the future.

I've been working on that the last four releases.

The guest reconstructs Apple's later reasoning on silicon as two judgments. First, Apple was not sure it could rely on Intel to stay that far ahead of the industry. Second, it could optimize system design together with silicon design, instead of using a chip that had been somewhat optimized for Windows rather than for Apple's own operating system. The guest stresses that Apple did not frame this as Intel failing as a supplier. In the guest's words, the stance was "No, I can supply myself better."