🚙 Intel’s $50B spinoff, explained

Intel has taken a number of Ls in recent decades.

The chipmaker’s main competitors — Nvidia ($810B market cap) and TSMC ($630B) — have passed it ($213B) in size. More recently, Apple dropped it like a bad habit as a chip supplier.

However, the company is amid a turnaround under CEO Pat Gelsinger and just announced a big move:

Intel is spinning off…

… Mobileye — its self-driving unit — at a projected valuation of $50B, per The Wall Street Journal. If the deal is completed by mid-2022 as planned, Intel will retain a majority stake.

Founded in Israel in 1999, Mobileye initially sought to reduce car accidents with collision-avoidance systems. Today, it develops chip-based cameras to “see” the road, guiding a car’s steering and braking mechanisms.

Mobileye previously went public in 2014, before Intel acquired it for $15.3B in 2017.

Why another IPO?

Public markets have shown significant appetite for next-gen auto stocks. Tesla is a $1T+ company while Rivian went public at $100B with zero (as in $0) revenue.

Mobileye notched $326m in sales in the latest quarter. Meanwhile, semiconductor chips are estimated to rise from 4% of a car’s material costs in 2019 to 20% by 2030, per WSJ.

Intel could use the cash

It’s committing $100B to build semiconductor plants in the coming years.

A Mobileye listing may spur a rush for other autonomous vehicle tech IPOs. Two potential spinoffs come to mind: Cruise (owned by GM) and Waymo (owned by Alphabet).

For the 1st time in a long time, Intel looks to be a trailblazer.

The numbers are in. According to the Economic Intelligence Unit, this year’s most expensive city is… (drumroll, please)…

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁 Tel Aviv, Israel! Congrats — er, wait — sorry?

Soaring currency, grocery, and transportation prices contributed to its rise. Some other findings of note:

• Rome saw the biggest drop in rankings, from 32nd to 48th.
• Tehran saw the biggest climb, from 79th to 29th (think: US sanctions).
• Hong Kong recorded the most expensive gas prices.
• Damascus was the cheapest city for a 2nd year in a row (think: civil war).

What if your charitable donations were part of your employee benefits, like insurance or PTO?

That’s what Groundswell envisions with its “philanthropy as a service” platform. The startup raised $15m in seed funding, to ramp up for an early 2022 launch.

Groundswell sells its services to companies…

… who set employees up with personal funds to donate as they see fit, using Groundswell’s platform.

The app also:

• Makes suggestions based on issues employees identify as important
• Lets users build shareable portfolios of charities they support
• Tracks donations for tax purposes

To grow the fund, employees can automatically divert a percentage of their paycheck, which employers can match.

But Groundswell founder and CEO Jake Wood told The Hustle he hopes companies just give away money to “empower employees to solve the problems that they think are most pressing in their communities.”

Companies not only get a tax deduction…

… but receive data about the issues that attract their employees’ dollars.

“There’s a role for companies to be writing big checks [and] tackling issues at a systemic level,” Wood told us.

“If they know what their people care about and can align those big checks to those values, then it’s a win-win for the organization that actually makes that corporate philanthropy more sustainable.”

So far, Groundswell has signed on a variety of companies, from hedge funds to consumer brands, with ~200 to 10k+ employees (though they haven’t officially named any names).

BTW: If you’re looking for charities to support, Charity Navigator is a searchable database of 195k+ nonprofits.