Jacobs was actively looking into an option to take the Qualcomm private, in the same way that Michael Dell did a few years back. Since Qualcomm’s market cap floats  at around $90 to $100 billion, this was no easy task to achieve.

One can only imagine how Jacob’s family was upset about the fact that Broadcom wanted to acquire Qualcomm. Paul worked as the CEO of Qualcomm between July 2005 to March 2014 and as executive chairman between March 2009 and March 2018 and his father, Irwin M. Jacobs, co-founded Qualcomm and contributed to some important standards including CDMA.

5G, wiress and IoT play

Paul is obviously a man of action and he also hired two ex Qualcomm C level executives, Derek Aberle who was president of Qualcomm until the end of 2017, and Matt Grob, a former CTO of Qualcomm. Aberle will work as the President and COO of XCOM while Grob will be a CTO at XCOM. The company has a basic website, these three chaps listed on the website and some job openings. They are currently looking to hire a Senior Communications System Engineer, a Senior Communications System Engineer, an Embedded Software Engineer and a Wireless Test Engineer. 

The new company could focus on the 5G wireless technologies' general idea to license proprietary 5G technology or provide software and designs to other companies. Aberle believes that the XCOM can prove the applicability of 5G trough various Internet of Things applications. 

Interestingly enough, the new company doesn’t mean that Paul Jacobs has abandoned his plan to take Qualcomm private. He would need to raise more than $146 billion -  the sum offered by Broadcom in its failed hostile takeover bid.