Interesting idea. And with Musk's ties to Trump, he doesn't need to buy Intel himself. The shake-up doesn't need to fit stereotypes, nor (with the current SCOTUS) satisfy legal niceties. If Musk told Trump "great countries make their own chips", the national security establishment echoed that, and Pat wound up in charge of Intel's fabs, with "Make Great Chips" for his marching orders...could Pat make that work out? It certainly would be interesting.
Yes, Pat could come back and take care of IFS, with this time a supporting CEO/board.
With the China/Taiwan tensions, it might be a good move for the US to not let Intel slip further, and stir that ship in the right direction.
Musk could justify the move to help his AI ventures (XAi, Tesla FSD, robot, etc.)
Not worrying about the worth of the company as much, but more to salvage the chip maker expertise that Intel still has (Intel has been in several rounds of layoffs, including 15,000 in 2024).
According to the article, splitting Intel would be good (short term) for the shareholders, bad long term, and bad for the country.
Intel is still a great asset, but it looks like it is losing its appeal as time passes. CEO of Intel is deemed to be a very challenging position. The board does not seem to know how to turn the ship around.
I could see Musk steering that ship. It is technically challenging (Musk seems to thrive in those environments), and it could even benefit the other Musk companies to some extent (XAi, Tesla and even maybe SpaceX).
Intel market cap is 94.713B (AMD is 233B, ARM Holdings is 144B... not mentioning NVIDIA), so about twice what Musk paid for Twitter. But if Musk sets his view on Intel, he would not have a hard time to finance the purchase. Actually, he could wait a bit more as the stock can fall even more (today, Intel stock is at the price of Dec. 1996).
This is armchair talking/joke, and it would be one more crazy thing on the 2024 bingo card, but from all the crazy things we have seen recently, Musk taking over Intel would look quite normal in comparison.
Maybe if he owned the whole thing and could run it as he liked, without having to care about the stock price or paying money to investors, but personally I don't think anyone can do it while also satisfying the stock market.
I'm not sure Musk is especially qualified either, except that he could afford it.
Now with the CHIPs money coming in, it might be the right time...