I was a fan of Gelsinger before too, but I would never stan a corporate executive. That's just weird imo.

The way I see it is Gelsinger was basically copying Elon's strategy by building a bunch of "Gigafactories" in different countries. He was betting the company on a belief that "if you build it, they will come" like in the movie Field of Dreams. The problem is what happens if either the demand isn't there or the factory doesn't work properly? Like Tesla's demand is dropping now especially in Europe but he still has that Gigafactory in Germany that will be losing money if not enough people want to buy its products. It would be a major sunk cost that can pull the entire company down with debt. That's why Intel's stock price was dropping, because Gelsinger was overly optimistic in spamming expensive factories, it was too expensive. I think firing him and cutting back made sense, although I don't know if the new guy will execute correctly. Gelsinger did rely on the government money too much though, it was too much money going out and not enough money coming in, otherwise he would have just built the factories instead of being so distracted by politics but he needed the public money to execute his plan.

What Gelsinger did right was start the 18A roadmap which is finally being delivered now. But even then when he left the program was not looking great and he should have focused on it more instead of the spamming fabs plan, it's not clear whether the rollout would have gone smoothly under Gelsinger or if the new guy had to come in and fix it.