A few days later, he received an unexpected call from Mr. Grove. The Hungarian-born executive, then the president of Intel, who later wrote the management book “Only the Paranoid Survive,” had built a culture of encouraging lower-level employees to challenge superiors if they could support their position. mr. Grove started Mr. Gelsinger, a relationship that lasted three decades.
In 1986, Mr. Grove mr. Gelsinger not to pursue his PhD at Stanford University and instead made him the leader of a 100-person team at age 24 that designed Intel’s 80486 microprocessor. Mr. Gelsinger went on to earn eight patents, becoming Intel’s youngest vice president in 1992 and the first person to hold the title of Chief Technology Officer in 2001.
His climb up the Intel ladder was defined by another priority: his faith.
Although he grew up in the mainstream United Church of Christ, Mr. Gelsinger said he didn’t really become a Christian until he attended the non-denominational church in Silicon Valley, where he met Linda Fortune, who later became his wife. It was at that church in 1980 that he heard the Reverend quote Revelation.
After Mr. Gelsinger became a born-again Christian, he struggled privately with whether to join the clergy. In a 2019 oral history conducted by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, he said he eventually decided to become a “workplace minister,” where “you really see yourself as working for God as your CEO, even though you’re work for Intel.”
Intel slips
In the mid-2000s, Mr. Gelsinger within Intel. Mr. Grove retired as Chairman of the Board in 2004. Another director, Paul Otellini, was appointed CEO in 2005. Mr Gelsinger said he was a “dissonant voice” in Intel’s senior executive team.
mr. Otellini pushed him to leave, Mr. Gelsinger. (Mr. Otellini passed away in 2017.) In 2009, Mr. Gelsinger accepted an offer to become president and chief operating officer of EMC, a maker of data storage equipment.
Intel’s departure after 30 years as a business man hurt a lot. “I was just so angry and emotional about the departure,” said Mr Gelsinger.
