In case you haven’t already heard, last week Intel filled us in on some pretty bad news, security flaws in billions of their chips across the industry.
Yea, billions.
Now that isn’t my personal interest here, companies are responding to the problem and patches are either being built or have been released.
What could be more interesting than a massive systemic security flaw? How about the CEO of Intel dumping $39 million dollars worth of stock and options BEFORE telling the world about this, little problem.
Needless to say this has raised a few questions and not too mention his confidence in the company going forward.
CEO Brian Krzanich reportedly sold as much as he could at the end of November, and now holds the minimum amount required by a CEO of Intel.
Intel is telling us that the stock sale is unrelated to knowledge of the security flaw, insisting that it was in fact a pre-arranged plan with an automated sale schedule and that that sounds kind of reasonable, UNTIL you realise that he made these pre-arranged plans only at the end of October. The minimum time needed for such a plan, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY he sold about 10 times the dollar value of stock and options he normally does, retaining the bare minimum instead of the approximate 500,000 shares he usually does.
At this point it doesn’t look like the SEC is going to look into this with Brian having covered his bases with all the beautiful technical loopholes at his disposal.
Like a captain jumping off a sinking ship before everyone else even knows there’s a hole in the goddamn boat, it’s definitely quite the bastard move.
That said though, for a reported net gain of $24-25 million dollars, any of us MIGHT have done the same, especially knowing the possible incoming risk to value of said stock and options.
arkaysthoughts 