Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

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You say:

> It's also interesting that Intel made some specific bad technical choices.

That's like saying Saudi Arabia made some bad policy decisions. If you are in Saudi Arabia, nothing has a higher return on investment than petroleum. If you invest in anything else, you are leaving money---A LOT of money--on the table.

The result is that capital is drained out of any other business, and the country gets so dependent on just one industry that when the oil runs out, it is a major crisis.

Put yourself in the place of an Intel CEO. You've just invested $4 Billion in a fab. People will by absolutely every single x86 chip that fab will make ~$40 billion over the course of the technology node's life time.

Or, you could make chips for the iPhone, which maybe, perhaps would be a hit? And even if Apple's wildest projections come true, you'll make $8 billion instead of $40 billion, because Apple is not going to pay for Intel to pocket a 90% profit margin, when it could just go to TSMC.

So you are a CEO, and wondering how on the next earnings call you are going to justify turning an asset worth $40 Billion into one worth $8 billion....

Was it not possible to build two fabs and make $48 billion?

What would you do? Build two fabs and make $48 billion, or build two fabs and make $80 billion?

It might be hard to remember now, but Intel was in the position NVIDIA is today: they could sell absolutely every x86 processor they could make, at pretty much any price they cared to name.

So even if Intel could have built another fab (which, btw, it couldn't, the world only graduates so many solid-state physics Ph.D.'s per year) but even if they could, they would STILL have used it to make x86 chips. Literally (not metaphorically or hyperbolically) nothing else they could manufacture would have as high a return on investment as making x86 chips did.

I don’t buy this completely. AMD’s 64-bit humiliation of Intel wasn’t that far in the past, and they knew GPUs were important. They could have hedged their bets a bit more on the basis of sound business management without incurring shareholder wrath.

Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta sunk billions into ventures that aren’t half as profitable as your hypothetical 8B deal, and shareholders haven’t sued yet.

Of course the founders have majority voting shares, but that doesn’t prevent them from being sued. It only prevents them/their designated CEO from being fired.

Theres a few differences between Intel and Google here. The first two points are from Peter Thiel:

1. Google really didn't know what to do with its excess money, which was why it was just stockpiling it and not using it to invest in its own business.

Intel, by contrast, always knew (at least in the Noyce/Grove era) what to do with its money.

2. Google's "side projects" were false-flags and smokescreens to make it look like it wasn't a monopoly. (Thiel says it much better himself in his article and speech titled "competition is for losers"-highly recommended).

Intel did a similar thing around the turn of the century, when it started making ARM chips--not because they were the most profitable thing they could be doing but because they didn't want to look like a monopoly.

And, of course, you really hit the nail on the thumb here:

> Of course the founders have majority voting shares

Yeah. The executives of google and facebook just don't face the same accountability from the shareholders that the execs of any honestly-governed public company does.

Its a two-edged sword: if google or facebook needs to spend a lot of money to pivot, they have the flexibility to do that in a way which other companies don't. However, the flip side implication is that, e.g. Zuckerberg can just spend $10 billion on a huge project, without being at all held accountable if it fails.

Right, and the ironic thing is that the founder having majority voting shares was allegedly justified by the idea that it would solve the innovators dilemma by not having the founders ("proven" capable of building successful products) being accountable to the short-term whims of the shareholder.

That said... my original point was that the shareholders don't sue in such situations. Rather, they just vote out the board (and hence CEO). If they could sue the board/CEO for not making as much profit as theoretically possible, they would have already sued Meta or Alphabet already despite having only minority shares. Proving to a court that the board/CEO isn't acting in the shareholder's best interest isn't as easy as comparing the projected returns of two mutually-exclusive deals -- they can argue that the ostensibly less profitable deal actually has great long term benefits.

> don't sue in such situations. Rather, they just vote out the board

cf. with the shareholder suit against Tesla. Why did they sue instead of firing the board of directors?

To vote out the board, you need >50% of the shareholders to back you. To sue the board, all you need is 1 disgruntled investor.

> and the country gets so dependent on just one industry that when the oil runs out, it is a major crisis.

Good thing we aren’t even slightly close to ever running out.

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