Jim Cramer is ‘furious’ as Intel crashes nearly 30% — but Uncle Sam is the top shareholder. What it means for taxpayers

Rewind to June, when Cramer went on record claiming Intel was his “new favorite stock in this market,” announcing he started buying the chipmaker for his charitable trust when it was trading above $100 per share.

Even though Cramer had reservations about jumping into a stock that already rallied over 200% on the year, he thought Intel would gain market share thanks to the AI data center buildout. As Cramer reasoned, “There’s a revolution going on and this revolution requires as many CPUs as possible,” referring to central processing units, the powerful processing chips used to run AI programs.

​The day after Intel’s third-quarter 2026 earnings report, Cramer bemoaned the fact that company leaders didn’t give investors earlier insight into their struggles, arguing “The chipmaker should have preannounced this terrible guidance.”

Cramer signaled he can’t justify selling his stash of Intel after such a decline. At the same time, he doesn’t recommend fresh buys either, admitting he “used poor judgment because I believed in the longer-term story without thinking about the short-term story.”

With shares sliding from a high of over $140 to under half that, it’s understandable why Intel bulls like Cramer are fuming.

But the story of Intel’s stock decline isn’t just bad news for individual investors. Ever since the U.S. government got involved, every American has invested some of their tax dollars into Intel.

The government’s big gamble on Intel

​In August 2025, the U.S. government became a large Intel shareholder, taking a 9.9% stake in the company. The $8.9-billion funding deal gave the U.S. 433.3 million Intel shares at an average price of $20.47 per share.​

At the time, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that “The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars.”

But the government had already earmarked Intel $5.7 billion in CHIPS Act grants and $3.2 billion through the Secure Enclave program. The 2025 deal simply sped up the transaction, using these taxpayer funds to buy shares rather than paying them out as grants.

Although Intel’s stock performance won’t directly impact each taxpayer’s pocketbook, such a large concentration in the government’s hands will have implications.

On the positive side, if Intel recovers, then the government can rest easy with a profitable position.

If times get tougher, however, then the U.S. will have a losing position on its balance sheet. In that case, it’s possible — but not inevitable — that more taxpayer funds might prop up Intel’s business.

And Intel is just one company that U.S. taxpayers now have to worry about. The Wall Street Journal reported that the federal government has spent $30 billion on 43 stock deals.

Moneywise reached out to Intel for further comment, but we didn’t hear back by publication time.