Paul Jacobs, former Qualcomm CEO and chairman, seems to have abandoned his dream of buying the chip company, and will now concentrate on his new start-up, XCOM. Last June, Jacobs left Qualcomm’s board at a time when the company was the subject of an acquisition bid by Broadcom (subsequently blocked by the US government) and was itself trying to acquire NXP (which also fell through). He was trying to line up investors to finance his own buyout of Qualcomm, taking his family firm (co-founded by his father Irwin Jacobs) private. This could have boosted its immunity to hostile takeover, and potentially sparked a full-scale reform of its business model amid multiple lawsuits (including that from Apple) and antitrust probes. However,…