Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

Didn't we already cross this particular Rubicon during the auto bailout a decade ago?

Other examples:

> Since the 1950s, the federal government has stepped in as a backstop for railroads, farm credit, airlines (twice), automotive companies, savings and loan companies, banks, and farmers.

Every situation has its own idiosyncrasies, but in each, the federal government intervened to stabilize a critical industry, avoiding systemic collapse that surely would have left the average taxpayer much worse off. In some instances, the treasury guaranteed loans, meaning that creditors would not suffer if the relevant industry could not generate sufficient revenue to pay back the loans, leading to less onerous interest rates.

A second option was that the government would provide loans at relatively low interest rates to ensure that industries remained solvent.

In a third option, the United States Treasury would take an ownership stake in some of these companies in what amounts to an “at-the-market” offering, in which the companies involved issue more shares at their current market price to the government in exchange for cash to continue business operations.

https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2022/08/23/piece-of-the-acti...

What happened to Intel? Did they need a bailout?

They got incredibly lucky with IBM choosing the 386 for the PC platform and have been riding that wave ever since.

Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC. Note too that x86-64 was developed by AMD, and Intel licensed it from them.

> Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC.

Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.

Intel is suffering because their old fab folks all retired, and no young, smart engineer over the last 20 years wanted to work for any semiconductor company let alone Intel.

> Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.

Even without the Itanium, the economies of scale in the x86(-64) world would have driven the RISC vendors out of the game.

True, but who knows how much later that would have happened, and how the market would have looked by then.

The false information about the future of Itanium scared almost all of them to surrender, about in the same way as the fictional Strategic Defense Initiative had scared the Russians.