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His marriage to Eva--the daughters call her "Eva the Saint"--has been the essential constant in Grove's life. He is clearly still nuts about her. There is a world-worn gentleness in their touch. She takes care of him: lays out his breakfast, orders the small details of his life, helps him find whatever he needs. Grove's big eyes--which in meetings can penetrate the skull of an unprepared executive at 50 ft.--are at their softest when he rests them on Eva.
The two of them are still trying to figure out what to do with all their money. The wealth is a surprise. Eva recalls the day when Grove got options in 1968: "I had higher hopes for Intel than he did. When he got his first options, I thought, 'Hmm. If that gets to be $100, then...' And he said, 'Ach! It's never going to be $100." Try $10,000. The Groves today are worth north of $300 million.
He could almost not care less. Grove doesn't spend his money on planes, giant homes or fast cars. He lives on a relatively modest scale. He and Eva plan to leave their daughters "comfortable," but the bulk of his fortune will go to charity. The Groves have endowed 10 chemistry scholarships at CCNY, made contributions to prostate-cancer funds and supported the International Rescue Committee, which brought Grove from Vienna to America. (He still remembers the day the IRC representative in Manhattan sent him out on Fifth Avenue with a blank check to buy the best hearing aid he could find.)
Mostly, though, he continues to fret about Intel's future. The firm faces dozens of challenges--from cheap PCs to antitrust investigations--and Grove is engaged in the meta-movements of the technology world more deeply than ever. Says David Wu, an analyst at ABN AMRO Chicago: "I used to have a lot of problems with Intel, but every time I asked them a question, they had already thought about it."
Grove polishes Intel strategy twice a year with a half-day "state of the industry" report to Intel's directors and top executives. After the presentation, the CEO submits to an intellectual firing squad led by the likes of Rock and Moore. Grove's performances, say those who have seen them, are a mixture of showmanship and brainpower, as if Albert Einstein were guest host of the Tonight Show. "Andy thinks faster than most people, certainly than me," says Rock, who has made billions betting on firms such as Intel and Apple. "I would hate to compete with Intel."
So do Intel's competitors. If Grove is tough on people inside Intel, he is brutal with competition. Intel's current victims are Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor, but no single firm poses much of a threat. Intel, says AMD CEO Jerry Sanders, makes it nearly impossible to get access to the big customers--Compaq, Dell, Gateway--that make for economies of scale. "That's where Intel makes it tough," says Sanders, another Fairchild alum. "In my view Intel goes right to the edge--and sometimes over it--to exclude people from providing chips to those guys."