Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

> The US getting 10% of Intel without any payment is very bad. Was there no shareholder vote?

I assumed they were buying shares like any other investor. How are they getting it for free?

I just want to point out ther the government buying shares just like any other private investor would have been roundly condemned across the political board even a year ago.

they were bailing out Intel. they have bailed out Intel

If they bought market shares, the funds didn't go to intel, but to the share holders.

> The purchase of the 433.3 million Intel shares will be made with funding from the $5.7 billion in unpaid grants from the Biden-era CHIPS Act and $3.2 billion awarded to Intel for the Secure Enclave program, also awarded under Trump's predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden.

From an article which I lost the link to. Their logic of free is that those grants are approved already, before Trump's intervention US gets nothing, after US gets 10% of Intel.

They are buying the shares like any other investor, but the white house lied about that. Plenty of people just repeated Trump's Truth Social post which claimed: "The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars".

In reality, the US bought a 10% stake for roughly $8.9 billion, paying market price for the shares.

Best as I can tell, the weird, broken logic is "these funds were already allocated via the chips act and another act, but we axed that, so buying the shares instead is free".

So sure, no new funds, of which "free" is a nutty, insane interpretation, but whatever.

Weird ways to convey it aside, I do like shares as a guarantee for grants, which is not a new thing, but I'd still like to enforce funds allocation for those funds. Not sure if that's happening still.

Thanks for clarifying

Reply on news.ycombinator.com