Was he or wasn’t he? Former Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares was abruptly un-CEO’d six months ago, an unsurprising turn of events for industry insiders but shocking when it comes to how disorganized the choice looked from the surface. Chairman John Elkann needed to take over, with no alternative candidate lined up, so while it looked like Tavares was fired, perhaps he just…quit?
In his first interview for the reason that disputed termination, Tavares told Bloomberg he wasn’t fired and that he left Stellantis because he and Elkann agreed to disagree concerning the company’s strategic direction. More on that in a minute. But first, allow us to appreciate the heights to which a man who began at Renault in 1981 as a test driving engineer can climb within the automobile business. Tavares offered his version of events from the bucolic surroundings of his farm in Portugal. Fired or not, he left Stellantis with $40 million.
Tavares was a protege of Carlos Ghosn, but when the 2 clashed over Tavares’ premature plans to succeed Ghosn as head of the Renault-Nissan alliance, the number-two executive left to run the PSA Group in 2014. He was the last of the empire-building generation within the auto industry, and we’ll never see his likes again.
Actually, Tavares was totally fired
Stellantis recently named Antonio Filosa as its recent CEO, an entire insider move as Filosa shouldn’t be a widely known executive. His elevation is a concession to Stellantis’ U.S. dealers, who’ve been in revolt over being forced to soak up excessive Jeep and RAM supply. It actually looks like Elkann is asking the shots, and what really happened is that he and Tavares negotiated Tavares’ departure, mostly likely on the behest of Henri de Castries, who was quoted within the press release that Stellantis issued when Tavares “resigned.”
“[I]n recent weeks different views have emerged which have resulted within the Board and the CEO coming to today’s decision,” de Castries said, oozing passive-aggressive Gallic diplomacy.
So the French a part of Stellantis totally fired Tavares and the Italian side is now running the corporate (John Elkann is the grandson of Gianni Agnelli, who made Fiat into an emblem of Italy’s postwar revival). Tavares is semi-retired and happily making Port in his homel while Sellantis stays the new mess it has been for the reason that merger of PSA and FCA in 2021. Tavares was actually the one guy left within the industry who had the chops to even consider tackling such an unholy tie-up. He had gotten it done at PSA, most notably acquiring Opel from GM in 2017 and turning across the General’s long standing European basket case.
On the time, GM caught some flak for letting Opel go, but a GM executive told me that was a dumb take. He said that it was in actual fact a fantastic deal because GM unloaded an enormous money loser and got $2.2 billion while Opel got to be the profitable automaker it never was when GM owned it. Tavares was on a roll.
Perhaps it might have been different – NOT!
Tavares told Bloomberg that things might have been done in a different way while also taking a couple of swipes on the Stellantis board and its U.S. dealers. But the entire idea of Stellantis was an insult to the legacy of Sergio Marchionne, the architect of FCA whose entire mission in life was to get the Agnellis out of the automobile business. Marchionne died unexpectedly in 2018, but he had succeeded in raising Chrysler from the ashes of its 2009 bankruptcy and merging it with FCA, then staging each a successful IPO of the brand new company in 2014 and a wildly profitable spin-off of Ferrari in 2015.
John Elkann presides over Exor, a $21-billion European financial colossus that absolutely doesn’t need Stellantis around its neck. An analyst I talked with back when Marchionne was alive and energetic said that you simply needed to do not forget that Sergio was a banker and his objective with FCA was to separate the assets, maxing out every shred of trapped value for the Elkann-Agnelli clan.
Stellantis was obviously the alternative of all that. And Tavares was no Marchionne. He was, like Ghosn before him, the one guy who would wish to lord over something as unruly as Stellantis. But the corporate was at all times a weirdly named bundle of world rivalries and 14 incompatible brands, with the money cows inconveniently positioned within the U.S. Given the chaotic situation for the world’s automakers as of late, Stellantis could easily collapse over the subsequent few years. And there isn’t any one left to reserve it.
This Article First Appeared At www.jalopnik.com
