After hinting at it earlier this week, President Trump confirmed today during a World Cup press briefing, that the U.S. government will take a 10% stake in Intel, capping a pretty eventful two-week stretch. Here’s how that happened.
A bit of context
Two weeks ago, Trump called for Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s resignation due to “highly CONFLICTED” ties with China: before joining Intel, Tan led Cadence Design, a firm that recently pleaded guilty to an investigation by the Justice Department over charges of selling its chip-design products to a Chinese military university.
The public callout followed a meeting between Tan and Trump, which seemed to turn things around. At the time, Trump posted on True Social:
”I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story.”
After the meeting, Trump claimed that his administration would “spend time together” with Tan over the following week, to discuss what became today’s announcement.
More to come
During today’s World Cup briefing in the Oval Office, Trump confirmed the Intel deal, and recounted his meeting with Tan:
“I said ‘you know what? I think the United States should be given 10% of Intel.’ And he said ‘I will consider that.’ And I said ‘Well, I’d like you to do that because Intel has been left behind, as you know, compared to Jensen and some of our friends, Nvidia, and some of the people and people and.. because Intel should have never been… Intel was the biggest, most powerful chip company in the world. And then they started leaving. And they started going to foreign countries, and particularly Taiwan. And if we had a president that would have said ‘Ok, you can go into Taiwan, but we’re going to put a 100% tariff, or 200%, or 300, or 500% tariff, anybody that sells into the United States has to pay,’ they wouldn’t have left.”
He didn’t go into the specifics of his deal, but as noted by The Verge, “he positioned the deal as a way for the executive to ‘keep his job.’” He also claimed that “he’ll do more” of such deals in the future, but didn’t name which other companies might become partly owned by his administration.
Following today’s events, Intel’s stock closed up nearly 6%.
What do you think of this deal? Let us know in the comments.
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