Kicking Pat cashes in a few chips

INTEL'S LEGENDARY technology fellow, Kicking Pat Gelsinger, netted himself $400,000 this week in a sale of stock (as they say in Monopoly).

Gelsinger bought 72,000 shares of stock at $19 a piece and sold them minutes later for just over $25, giving him a cool $441,360 in profit.

More interesting than the 'what' is the 'why'. Executives exercise their stock options all the time and there are generally specified timeframes in which they have to do these things to avoid allegations of insider trading.

But the sell-off seems uncharacteristic of our man Pat. A profit of $6 a share isn't particularly heady, especially given the common belief within Intel that the stock will hit $30 at some point in the next 12 months on the back of increasing market dominance over AMD.

The sell-off smells like a quick buck being made by a man not known for his desire for quick bucks - this is the man that's been with Intel for about as long as he can remember, we suspect.

We can merely speculate as to what prompted the outburst and wonder if Pat might perhaps be becoming increasingly disenchanted with the firm and pessimistic about its future, as his career appears stalled without much to provide it a jump start. It wasn't long ago that most were predicting him as a shoe-in to the top job at INTC, and now very few would foist that suspicion upon him.

But perhaps we read too much into what is, after all, a rather handy bit of change being made by Kicking Pat. We'll be keeping an eye on his IDF appearance, to see what shoes he's wearing. µ