Fiat, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 59Ben Gilbert 10Doug DeMuro 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Fiat comes up
Ferrari: What happens when you staple a luxury brand to a sports team? (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 11:23 David Rosenthal So his mom arranges for him to travel to Turin, big city in the northeast of Italy, where he interviews for a job at Fiat.
- ▶ 11:30 David Rosenthal And Fiat is the biggest Italian car company at the time and will
- ▶ 11:36 David Rosenthal It is, as you all probably know, essentially the Ford Motor Company of Italy, and the family behind it, the Agnellis, are the wealthiest and most important industrialists basically in the history of Italy, and today they own and control…
- ▶ 12:08 David Rosenthal Fiat, of course, rejects his job application because, again, he has no discernible skills, but Enzo is persistent.
- ▶ 13:36 David Rosenthal Well enough not only to send some prize money back home to mom, but also to attract the attention of Alfa Romeo, which is Italy's other large car company at the time, although much, much smaller than Fiat.
- ▶ 21:23 David Rosenthal As we alluded to with the whole coach building thing, unless you're one of the few, you know, new at this point, really mass assembly line consumer car companies like Fiat or like
- ▶ 43:39 David Rosenthal Italy's own most celebrated industrialist, Gianni Agnelli, the patriarch of the Agnelli family, which owns Fiat.
- ▶ 43:52 Ben Gilbert The founding family of Fiat.
- ▶ 48:44 David Rosenthal You know, other car manufacturers, as we talked about with Alpha or Mercedes or, or even for a point in time, even Fiat, had their own racing teams, but they were separate operations.
- ▶ 1:21:38 David Rosenthal Really, at the end of the day, though, there's only one correct buyer for Ferrari, and it's Gianni Agnelli and the Fiat Empire.
- ▶ 1:21:51 David Rosenthal With Gianni to sell 50% of Ferrari to Fiat immediately there in 1969 with a secret agreement that triggered upon Enzo's death, which again he thinks is imminent, Fiat will acquire another 40%, taking their stake to 90%,
- ▶ 1:22:38 David Rosenthal And part of the deal with Fiat,
- ▶ 1:22:40 David Rosenthal Just like he wanted with Ford, is that, Fiat, you can take control of the road car business, but I'm gonna retain final authority over racing.
- ▶ 1:23:17 Ben Gilbert In 1969 is when the 50% sale to Fiat.
- ▶ 1:23:38 Ben Gilbert Enzo started his career by applying for a job at Fiat and was turned down.
- ▶ 1:24:35 Ben Gilbert This needs to land with Fiat, and whatever the price is, it is.
- ▶ 1:24:40 Ben Gilbert And so I think Fiat basically got a steal on this, because it needed to stay in Italy, and it needed to go to a strong, thriving car company.
- ▶ 1:25:09 David Rosenthal He did this not great deal with Fiat.
- ▶ 1:26:20 David Rosenthal Fiat and Gianni Agnelli had to be the buyer to store Ferrari through this period.
- ▶ 1:26:37 David Rosenthal He's away from the business for many months, which really makes it incredibly fortuitous that he had already done the deal with Fiat, so there was
- ▶ 1:34:02 David Rosenthal He's like, ooh, now I can have a spy at Fiat in the Agnelli family too.
- ▶ 1:34:51 David Rosenthal Things aren't good on the road car side of the business, but like, at the end of the day, that's Fiat's problem now.
- ▶ 1:40:36 David Rosenthal The F-One team leaves day-to-day at Ferrari and goes to work for Fiat in Turin.
- ▶ 1:40:49 David Rosenthal And I think Enzo thinks that he's going to still have a spy now in Fiat with Luca, which maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, but sadly this is another tragedy.
- ▶ 1:46:44 David Rosenthal Second, that Fiat and the Agnelli family
- ▶ 1:47:42 David Rosenthal Fiat's attempt, their best solution to fixing the problem of the road car business is to produce more road cars, which is the cardinal sin of luxury strategy management.
- ▶ 1:50:16 David Rosenthal After Ferrari, he did a short stint at Fiat, and then he stayed in the Agnelli empire.
- ▶ 1:52:40 David Rosenthal It was Fiat.
- ▶ 1:52:42 David Rosenthal They came in of like, oh, the, the way we can fix this is when increased production will cut costs, so let's share some parts with Fiat cars.
- ▶ 1:52:50 David Rosenthal You know, Ferrari road cars went from being the same thing, built by the same people as the racing cars, as the F-One cars and the Le Mans cars in the same factory, to in this period with Fiat control, they're really not the same thing.
- ▶ 1:53:06 David Rosenthal You know, these are, it would be too far of a stretch to say they were repurposed Fiats, but they had lost that true connection.
- ▶ 2:08:31 David Rosenthal In the last years of Enzo and the Interregnum period when Fiat was taking control, there were some Fiat parts and switches that were making their way into Ferraris.
- ▶ 2:15:14 David Rosenthal It ends up in the hands of Fiat, and in the late nineties, Fiat says, why don't we give Maserati management over to Ferrari?
- ▶ 2:16:51 Ben Gilbert I think remarkably Ferrari has had the soul of a standalone company, even though it was for a very long period of time, 90% owned by Fiat.
- ▶ 2:17:15 David Rosenthal Well, speaking of Ferrari also being part of the Fiat and Agnelli empire, something pretty big is about to change here as we enter the early 2000, which is Gianni Agnelli passes away and all of a sudden the Fiat empire is now in crisis.
- ▶ 2:19:59 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, the fiat business
- ▶ 2:20:23 David Rosenthal She calls Luca after Umberto dies and asks him to take over as Fiat chairman and replace Gianni and Umberto in addition to Ferrari.
- ▶ 2:20:34 David Rosenthal So Luca will stay at Ferrari, but he will now come and serve the Agnellis as sort of a stored and a bridge to the next generation while they get the house in order and hopefully try to save Fiat along the way.
- ▶ 2:20:49 David Rosenthal He's now chairman of Fiat and Ferrari.
- ▶ 2:21:24 David Rosenthal So Luca and John Elcan have to work together to try to save fiat.
- ▶ 2:21:59 David Rosenthal With Fiat.
- ▶ 2:22:09 Ben Gilbert The Agnelli family empire is larger than just Fiat.
- ▶ 2:22:21 David Rosenthal The Agnelli family Fiat was the crown jewel, but they invested in and built many businesses over the years.
- ▶ 2:22:30 David Rosenthal So the three of them together miraculously turn around Fiat and save it from the abyss through the combination of a couple things.
- ▶ 2:23:56 David Rosenthal Now, the other thing that happens, and this is all Sergio's doing, he totally restructured the operations at Fiat.
- ▶ 2:24:06 David Rosenthal And at a company like Fiat, that actually is like really, really important.
- ▶ 2:24:11 David Rosenthal The other thing he did is Fiat had a ill-fated partnership with GM, with General Motors.
- ▶ 2:24:18 David Rosenthal Out of the partnership and engineers GM paying two billion dollars to Fiat in order to end the partnership.
- ▶ 2:24:34 David Rosenthal So Sergio Luca and John Elkin come into Fiat in 2004.
- ▶ 2:25:01 Ben Gilbert Man, it's crazy that Fiat just barely got their house in order in time.
- ▶ 2:25:48 David Rosenthal Fiat paid either zero or almost zero in sort of equity value for Chrysler.
- ▶ 2:25:58 David Rosenthal I mean, Chrysler and Dodge and Jeep and all of its brands are a thing today and part of Stellantis today because of what Fiat and Sergio did during the financial crisis.
- ▶ 2:26:23 David Rosenthal So as everything is stabilizing at Fiat and returning to success, in 2010, Luca steps down from the Fiat chairmanship and returns solely full-time to Ferrari.
- ▶ 2:26:35 David Rosenthal John Elkin assumes the Fiat chairmanship then.
- ▶ 2:26:38 David Rosenthal He's now ready to, you know, be the steward and heir of the Agnelli family and work with Sergio and running the Fiat empire.
- ▶ 2:26:48 David Rosenthal There is one cost to taking over Chrysler, which was that in doing so, Fiat had to assume Chrysler's debt, including about five and a half billion dollars that it owed the U.S. and Canadian governments for the bailout.
- ▶ 2:27:19 David Rosenthal Fiat announces to Wall Street as part of the merger, though, Sergio does.
- ▶ 2:29:07 David Rosenthal They saved Fiat together.
- ▶ 2:29:25 David Rosenthal His passion was Ferrari, his history was there, he could go back to running it and be very happy, and Sergio could leave it alone and continue running the Fiat Empire.
- ▶ 2:30:59 Ben Gilbert 10% of Fiat's 90%?
- ▶ 2:31:11 David Rosenthal The company, Fiat, the Empire, has to get the money.
- ▶ 2:31:31 David Rosenthal I think Luca probably had zero interest in taking Ferrari public, and I think he had even less than zero interest in using proceeds from the Ferrari IPO and the other financial engineering that we're about to talk about to save Chrysler…
- ▶ 2:32:38 David Rosenthal Part of the reason that the Ferrari Formula One team wasn't performing well at this point in time was that Formula One had switched to hybrid powertrains, and Fiat never developed hybrid technology, so Ferrari didn't have anywhere to turn…
- ▶ 2:34:15 David Rosenthal So, with Luca gone, the path is cleared to IPO Ferrari, and in 2015, Fiat and Sergio float, as you said Ben, 10% of their 90% ownership stake in Ferrari on the New York Stock Exchange for an initial total market cap of Ferrari of 9.8…
- ▶ 2:37:21 Ben Gilbert Ferrari was not appreciated by investors when it was nestled inside of fiat for the real gem that it was.
- ▶ 2:37:44 David Rosenthal The Fiat empire has never been better.
- ▶ 2:37:49 David Rosenthal Fiat is saved.
- ▶ 2:42:45 David Rosenthal Ferrari today is even farther away from Fiat than it was before the IPO.
Hermès (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:28:08 David Rosenthal They end up selling it off, actually pretty recently, to the, uh, Agnelli family from Italy, which is the family behind Fiat.
Porsche (with Doug DeMuro) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:31:01 Doug DeMuro oh god, Ferrari's so sorry, that is a crazy one also, but the Fiat group eventually had