“History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.”
Salman Rushdie
On October 30, 2026, Intel lost nearly a third of its market value in a single trading session. Billions of dollars vanished, confidence trembled, and the market delivered its judgment with extraordinary brutality.
But I cannot help feeling a profound sadness for Lip-Bu Tan.
Not because markets fall. Not because investors lose money. But because a man who has devoted decades to building, nurturing and rescuing companies may one day be remembered for a single Friday on Wall Street.
That would be an injustice far greater than the financial loss itself.
When Tan accepted the responsibility of leading Intel in March 2025, he inherited more than a troubled corporation. He inherited the fading industrial pride of an American technological institution, decades of accumulated mistakes, and the expectations of millions who still believed in its resurrection.
He did not create all its problems. He chose to confront them.
And there is something profoundly noble about accepting responsibility for a future whose difficulties were largely written before one’s arrival.
Intel’s share price stood at $20.68 when his appointment was announced. Even after Friday’s devastating decline, it remained more than three times that level. Yet human nature, and particularly the nature of financial markets, has a peculiar tendency to remember the violence of the latest disappointment more vividly than the magnitude of the preceding achievement.
Tan’s career at Cadence and Walden International was built upon a principle that markets frequently forget: meaningful creation requires patience. Factories are not built in trading sessions. Technologies are not perfected between earnings calls. And industrial greatness, once lost, cannot be restored merely because shareholders demand it by the next quarter.
None of this absolves leadership of accountability. Nor does it diminish the legitimate concerns surrounding Intel’s capital expenditure, manufacturing execution, profitability and ability to secure external foundry customers.
But accountability and historical judgment are not the same thing.
The market is entitled to question his strategy. It is entitled to punish disappointing expectations. What it cannot do is determine, in a single afternoon, the ultimate worth of a man’s undertaking.
Perhaps the saddest irony is that those who attempt the most difficult transformations often expose themselves to the harshest judgments. Those who preserve the status quo may escape history’s attention; those who attempt to change it risk becoming its casualties.
I hope that October 30 will eventually be remembered as a painful chapter in Intel’s recovery, rather than the defining chapter of Lip-Bu Tan’s legacy.
For history should remember not merely what a man lost, but what he dared to rebuild.
Markets measure a man in moments. History measures him in generations.
And one day, however merciless, is not a verdict.
— Grogu Ledak
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