By the early 1970s, Noyce, already the equivalent of today’s multimillionaires, framed the narrative and set the example that companies like Winmore are still following in the second decade of the new millennium. He smashed early efforts by Intel engineers to unionize with several different labor organizations, including the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Teamsters, and the Stationary Engineers. According to Wolfe, “Noyce made it known, albeit quietly, that he regarded unionization as a death threat to Intel, and to the semiconductor industry generally. Labor management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the East. If Intel were divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished.”

But in the 1970s many of the most successful companies in the United States were unionized, with CEOs in the auto, steel, and chemical industries, and others with incomes putting them in the top 1 percent. Noyce’s antipathy toward unions raises another question: Was he not content to be filthy rich and instead needed to make more than any other CEO, or was he ideologically opposed to unions and didn’t believe that the company’s rank and file were as valuable and crucial to its success as management? Or was it both, given that greed and the defense of inequality go together like integrated and circuit? We won’t ever know for sure, since he died in 1990 at age sixty-three. But judging from the case of the fifteen high-level engineers fired illegally by Winmore in 2018, whom we do know, and who were seeking simple things like clarity about paid time off, fair work rules, and better management systems, casting unions as a “death threat to the industry” was likely as absurd then as it is now.