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Comment by TriangleEdge | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how the finances work here. Is the proposal that the US govt buys 10% of available stocks at some price from Intel to give them cash to operate? Why doesn't Intel just get some investors to do that? If Intel is no longer competitive from an investor standpoint, then what's the point?

A quick ChatGPT search tells me Intel owns none of it's own stock, so I'm confused. It tells me a company can sell newly created stocks and dilute the value of the old stocks. I didn't know this was possible. Is this the proposed case?

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> It tells me a company can sell newly created stocks and dilute the value of the old stocks. I didn't know this was possible.

Yes, absolutely, and it's a fairly normal process. How do you think VC investment works? Founders take funding in exchange for diluting their ownership. Further investment rounds dilute all shareholders, including big investors from prior rounds. IPOs often involve issuing new shares, further diluting existing investors. Acquisitions can even result in zeroing out some classes of equity.

Existing investors put up with it because either a) they believe their diluted shares will end up being worth more in the long run, because the new investment is critical to growth or success, or because b) they don't have enough voting power to stop it.

Corporate structure and ownership is just a legal fiction. There's no set number of slices that a company is cut into, and contracts, terms, by-laws, etc. can change that at any time.

Say you own 100% of a company whose fair value is $100 dollars. I give the company $900 and in exchange it issues me enough new shares that I own 90% of the company. Now you own 10% of a $1,000 company, with exactly the same number of shares as before, and your shares having the same fair value as before. Now this does assume that controlling stake of a company is not really worth anything, which is theoretically true if none of us is doing illegal-if-not-particularly-easy-to-prove screw-over-minority-shareholders type stuff.

Not to say there is never any funny business: with private companies who don't have a market for their stock the 'fair value' is not obvious and you can play games with that number to dilute away the ownership of people who don't have board seats.

From the subhead

> Money earmarked for semiconductor company under Chips Act could be converted into equity

They’re already getting federal money.

An amount of stocks is created relative to the investment. Share value stays the same. Ownership percentage is diluted.

They can issue new stock I imagine. I think this is to keep fab capacity of advanced nodes still producing in the us and to ensure the engineering talent is not scattered by a breakup of Intel

> engineering talent is not scattered by a breakup of Intel

They'd be happy to nudge them from blue states (e.g. Hillsboro and Santa Clara) to red states.

Maintaining fab capacity requires product to run through that fab. Intel no longer has enough volume to maintain that on new advanced nodes (yeah, farming out CPUs to TSMC is super helpful on that front), and nobody wants to be a foundry customer of Intel given how badly they have failed to support those efforts over the past 20 years. I mean how badly are the fabs being run if they burned bridges with 3 different FPGA companies? The fabs need to be spun out of Intel and given a competent management team that knows how to run a foundry, build a new customer base and try to turn a profit in 10 years or so.

Honestly, throwing more money towards Intel without breaking it up is just going to increase the scale of the losses at this point. The internal culture is so broken that the likelihood of turning things around is negligible.

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