Ex-CEO Predicts Corporate Breakup Could Shatter Stellantis

Carlos Tavares has been out as CEO of Stellantis for about a year, but that hasn’t stopped him from commenting on the global conglomerate he helped create.

Stellantis is now in serious trouble. (Photo: Stellantis X)

He has a new book out, and the French title, Un pilote dans la tempête (“A Pilot in the Storm”), tells you much of what to expect. In its pages, Tavares suggests that a Stellantis breakup could be on the horizon, Matthew DeBord reported for Jalopnik.

“I am worried that the three-way balance between Italy, France, and the U.S. will break,” Tavares said in the book. The group’s survival as a standalone company, he warned, will depend on management maintaining unity “every day,” given the risk of being pulled in multiple directions.

Tavares speculated: “One possible scenario... could be a Chinese manufacturer one day making a bid for the European business, with the Americans taking back the North American operations.”

Those who remember when Chrysler was owned by Cerberus Capital Management before its 2009 bankruptcy may be understandably skeptical about a return to U.S. ownership of Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram.

Following bankruptcy, Chrysler was merged with Fiat, and the architect of that deal — the late Sergio Marchionne — took the new company public while also spinning off Ferrari in its own IPO.

Both efforts proved successful, Ferrari’s spectacularly so.

But Marchionne died before completing his life’s work. In 2021, the mergers and acquisitions went to the next level, and Stellantis was born.

Tavares oversaw that transformation, and he was likely the last “empire builder” in the auto industry bold enough to take it on, having studied under Carlos Ghosn, the now-disgraced architect of the Renault-Nissan alliance.

But Stellantis is now in serious trouble, frustrating the efforts of John Elkann — the billionaire Fiat heir who controls the company — to resolve its issues.

Elkann “urgently wants out,” DeBord wrote, “but Stellantis keeps dragging him back in.” Tavares appears to be engaging in a bit of reputation rehabilitation while simultaneously stirring the pot.

In his book, he casts himself as a defender of the French parts of the Stellantis empire — the PSA Group, which he took over in 2014 — where he earned substantial credibility as a visionary dealmaker after acquiring Opel from GM in 2017 and turning around a division that General Motors had spent decades struggling to fix.