Intel was in danger because they went from having massive amounts of cash on hand to losing billions per quarter with no roadmap to retake the market in the face of competition from both AMD and ARM. They also didn't have competitive GPUs, they lost the automotive market, they lost the networking market outside of desktop/laptop WiFi, and they'd lost any potential market in handhelds/embedded ages ago. Intel is a company that is massively capital intensive, and they simply cannot afford to be in that position. Looking at the need for billions in investment while burning billions per quarter and no good pathway to profitability, investors leave and the company is forced to make dramatic cuts which furthers the death spiral.