I believe the Bloomberg story. Why? Because of the fact that the chip was originally found on hardware owned by Elemental. Elemental would have been a great com

I believe the Bloomberg story. Why? Because of the fact that the chip was originally found on hardware owned by Elemental. Elemental would have been a great company to target. My guess is that Elemental was specifically targeted because the cost of doing so would be pretty small and with nearly a 100% chance of success. Back in 2015, Elemental was nearly guaranteed to be acquired by one of the greats (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) because they had grown too large to be acquired by smaller companies but were also unlikely to go public on their own. The company was doing very well, plus they had government clients. Knowing that Elemental would likely be acquired and infecting their hardware beforehand would have been pretty sophisticated but also an easy thing for a malicious party to do. Even if the hackers didn't know/plan for Elemental's acquisition, they still would have been a great target based on their government work. (I'm not trying to fault Elemental; I would expect the same thing to happen at basically any small company that employs maybe 10 hardware specialists) And if the story were fake, why would Elemental even be mentioned? It's too small and obscure to be of note otherwise.