I abandon my lunge for the soup spoon when Pat Gelsinger politely asks if he can say grace. “Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity with Michael at the FT?.?.?. ” he commences.
This is not how most meals with Silicon Valley heavyweights start. But Gelsinger, whose ousting as Intel chief executive last year came during his monumental effort to reshape America’s semiconductor industry, has never been conventional.
The Pennsylvania “farm boy” helped build the foundations of the modern tech industry, spent decades rising to the top one of America’s most iconic companies and played a pivotal role in the most consequential US manufacturing legislation in half a century, the 2022 Chips Act.