David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I gotta say, it's so funny that we feel the need here on the Ferrari episode to extol the virtues of the Fiat 500, but it ends up becoming actually very important and path-dependent to Ferrari's trajectory from here and why a few things happen at Ferrari. And it was designed by a man named Frank Stevenson, who had been Luca's in-house design guy at Ferrari. Ferrari when Luca was just at Ferrari. So there's a Ferrari connection and lineage there that gets pushed up to the FIA 500. Now, the other thing that happens, and this is all Sergio's doing, he totally restructured the operations at Fiat. He was like an efficiency and cost-cutting specialist. And at a company like Fiat, that actually is like really, really important. The other thing he did is Fiat had an ill-fated partnership with GM. Them with General Motors. Sergio gets them out of the partnership and engineers GM paying $2 billion to Fiat in order to end the partnership. And I think without that $2 billion, the company almost certainly would have died. Wow. He is a magician. He really is a magician. So Sergio, Luca, and John Elkann come into Fiat in 2004. Within 2 years, they have returned the company to profitability. They've got a handle on the debt. 2007, the Fiat 500 comes out. It's a massive success. 2008 hits, the financial crisis. All of the U. S. Car companies are in really bad shape. Man, it's crazy that Fiat just barely got their house in order in time. Just barely. Otherwise they could have been down with the rest of the global economy.…

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