Wolfgang Porsche, the 79-year-old grandson of the founder, is readying to step down and insiders are watching closely to see who might take the lead
Forget BMW’s Quandts, the prestigious Agnellis of Fiat, and America’s Ford clan. The billionaire descendants of the man who started Porsche are one step closer to becoming the most powerful family in cars.
Still, if there’s any word that describes the Porsche-Piëch lineage, it’s conflict. With decades of bitter rivalry and intrigue, back-stabbing and Nazism, the story of the Porsche-Piëch legacy plays out like Succession, but in German. It started with Ferdinand Porsche, Adolf Hitler’s preferred engineer, who founded his eponymous company in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1931.
Ferry, who was also arrested for wartime activity with the SS, kept the Porsche company running while his father was in prison. He was central to building it into the takeover-proof fortress it is today. In 1948, he and Anton Piëch met to lay the groundwork for plans that would eventually become the “VW Law” of 1960, which gives Lower Saxony 20% of VW’s ordinary shares and is classed as a blocking minority. The law, in theory, protects the company from a hostile takeover.
A family meeting and attempted reconciliation led by Ferry in Zell am See, Austria, in 1970 served only to deepen the divide. . The family decreed as of 1972 that no family member could work in the future at Porsche, which would be operated only by outside managers. Butzi Porsche then founded Porsche Design as an outside operation, which produced sunglasses, skis, and watches, among other collectibles.
Piëch left his position as chair of VW in 2015, perfectly timed to let his successor and protégé, Martin Winterkorn, take the fall for the diesel emissions scandal that has cost the company more than $30bn and counting. Before his death in 2019, Der Spiegel described the company culture Piëch had created at VW as “North Korea without the labour camps.”
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