You’re Fired! Big corporate CEO’s dropping like flies this week.

Photo above – drone’s eye view of Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara California. However, no chips are made there. They are fabricated at 27 other sites, including China, Malaysia, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Germany, and the Philippines. So what do the 14,600 employees at this location actually do, if they don’t make chips? In any case, Intel is losing A LOT of money.

The laptop I’m using to post has a sticker: “Intel Inside”. So many of them do. You’d think a company this ubiquitous would be able to turn a profit. You’d think. Pat Gelsinger has been Intel’s CEO since 2021. During that time the stock has lost half its value. And down another 5% today. Negative earnings - It lost $3.74 a share in the most recent reporting period. (Full disclosure – this writer bought Intel at $21.18 on August 2nd. Still showing a capital gain, but barely).

But this post isn’t to gloat that I’ve avoided losing money. It’s to criticize the absurd severance package that Intel showered on Gelsinger. He will get $10 million. But his base salary is only $1.25 million. He’s getting the equivalent of 5+ years of salary for agreeing to put his stuff in a cardboard box and clear out immediately. Gelsinger departed yesterday. Nobody knew until Intel filed the required SEC forms. See link below.

If you want to know why worker bees at all levels have unrealistic expectations for wages, bonuses, and benefits, I give you Intel’s Gelsinger as exhibit A. 5 years' salary as a reward for effing the company up royally in just a couple of years. To be fair, Mr. Gelsinger DID head a project team that came up with a clever chip a decade ago. And he’s worked mostly at INTC for the past 30 years, except for a few brief adventures elsewhere.

$10 million. Whoo-ee!

This severance amount, if clawed back, wouldn’t help Intel become profitable of course. But it’s the principle. You shouldn’t give someone $10 million to make sure they leave they day they’re fired without trash talking.

Who else got fired this month? The Stellantis CEO. That’s the company which makes Jeeps, Ram trucks, one Chrysler minivan. Stellantis has over a dozen brands, but only Jeep, Ram, and Fiat make money. And Fiat only sells 1 model in America – the 500E – which has a consensus opinion as the worst EV we can buy. Other Stellantis brands are hilariously scarce and of indifferent quality: Maserati, Lancia, Opel, Citroen, Vauxhall, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo. You see the problem, right?

Stellantis had a simple strategy: Keep increasing the price of Jeep Wranglers 10% a year for as long as they could get away with it. Well, they hit the wall this year. Stellantis’ share price dropped from $30 to around $12. (Full disclosure – I don’t own STLA yet, but I have a buy order in at $10).

The CEOs of Starbucks, Boeing, Costco, Nike, and Subway are also gone. A couple of these guys were given until December 31st to clean out their desks, but most are gone already, like Intel.

This is an unexpected development, to say the least, in a nation where we were assured that America was at full employment, and inflation was licked, all courtesy of Bidenomics..

Is it okay to theorize that we were fed a plate of BS during the past year? And that ordinary voters smelled a rat? Food prices, home prices, electricity prices, Jeep prices, Starbucks prices . . . they were all mostly excluded from the inflation index politicians always like to point to.

I’m not hoping for more CEOS to get fired. But if they screw up, they probably should be. But don’t pay them $10 million to go quietly, and hope nobody notices. Make an example of them, so their successors will try to do better.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Intel's ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger set to net $10M in severance pay | TechCrunch