I don't have any inside information to add here, but from the outside, I think a fair bit of the Gelsinger dissing is presumptuous. By the time he came on board, Intel's fab tech was already in a hard-failure state, and vanishingly few CEOs could have turned that around in four years. In other words: not being privy to what happened inside Intel, I don't know how good a job Gelsinger did or didn't do. Maybe he did, in fact, do a terrible job. But without question, he inherited a complete disaster. So without more, the only real conclusion I can draw from the external observables is that he wasn't a miracle worker. Which, to be fair, some select few CEOs are - but I don't know who Intel could have gotten who would've executed at that level. You can't just call up Gwynne Shotwell and convince her to come rehabilitate your failed engineering culture for you. The select few who can lead at that level of competence are already running their own major corporations, and it's hard to find new rare leadership talent like that.