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 in terms of how disorganized the decision looked from the outside. Chairman John Elkann had to take over, with no replacement candidate lined up, so while it looked like Tavares was fired, maybe he just…quit?
In his first interview since the disputed termination, Tavares told Bloomberg he wasn’t fired and that he left Stellantis because he and Elkann agreed to disagree about the company’s strategic direction. More on that in a minute. But first, let us appreciate the heights to which a guy who started at Renault in 1981 as a test driving engineer can climb in the car 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 two 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 in the auto industry, and we’ll never see his likes again.
Actually, Tavares was totally fired
Stellantis recently named Antonio Filosa as its new CEO, a complete insider move as Filosa is not a well-known executive. His elevation is a concession to Stellantis’ U.S. dealers, who have been in revolt over being forced to absorb excessive Jeep and RAM supply. It actually looks like Elkann is calling the shots, and what really happened is that he and Tavares negotiated Tavares’ departure, mostly likely at the behest of Henri de Castries, who was quoted in the press release that Stellantis issued when Tavares “resigned.”
“[I]n recent weeks different views have emerged which have resulted in the Board and the CEO coming to today’s decision,” de Castries said, oozing passive-aggressive Gallic diplomacy.
So the French part of Stellantis totally fired Tavares and the Italian side is now running the company (John Elkann is the grandson of Gianni Agnelli, who made Fiat into a symbol of Italy’s postwar revival). Tavares is semi-retired and happily making Port in his homel while Sellantis remains the hot mess it has been since the merger of PSA and FCA in 2021. Tavares was certainly the only guy left in 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 around the General’s long standing European basket case.
At 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 fact a great deal because GM unloaded a massive 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.
Maybe it could have been different – NOT!
Tavares told Bloomberg that things could have been done differently while also taking a few swipes at the Stellantis board and its U.S. dealers. But the whole 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 car 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 both a successful IPO of the 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 active said that you had to remember 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 opposite of all that. And Tavares was no Marchionne. He was, like Ghosn before him, the only guy who would want to lord over something as unruly as Stellantis. But the company was always a weirdly named bundle of global rivalries and 14 incompatible brands, with the cash cows inconveniently located in the U.S. Given the chaotic situation for the world’s automakers these days, Stellantis could easily collapse over the next few years. And there is no one left to save it.