John Elkann, the billionaire scion of the Fiat-founding Agnelli clan that controls Stellantis, is not going to be able to get his family out of the car business anytime soon. That’s one of the many takeaways from a big Bloomberg story on the troubles of the sprawling multinational, which recently went through a leadership convulsion when Carlos Tavares abruptly departed last year, replaced by insider Antonio Filosa in May, following a lurching executive search.
From Bloomberg, quoting an academic who is pretty skeptical about Elkann’s objectives:
If Stellantis, formed from the 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler and France’s PSA Group, is Elkann’s link to the past, it’s also his problem, and a drag on his portfolio. “John Elkann longs to trade pistons for pixels…,” says Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffè, a professor of business strategy at Milan’s Bocconi University…. “He’s perhaps betting on sleek M&A to redefine the empire, but the rust in Europe’s car industry demands more than a visionary’s touch to shine.”
Trading pistons for pixels goes way back
Years ago, when Sergio Marchionne was still alive and running FCA, I talked to a bank analyst about the CEO’s master plan. He said that the goal was to separate the assets – having stabilized Fiat and assembled FCA from the ruins of Chrysler, he could survey the Elkann empire and figure out how to maximize the value of its parts. Ferrari’s IPO in 2015 was his biggest success. Other spinoffs and ultimately a merger of FCA with another automaker were key aspects of his vision.
John Elkann, in the meantime, was using his family’s multibillion-dollar firm, Exor, to move into non-automotive interests, as Bloomberg notes. Marchionne died unexpectedly in 2018 before he could finish his life’s work, and ever since then Elkann, as chairman, has been solving the FCA and later Stellantis puzzle. He’s been doing this in the wake of Marchionne and Tavares, who were two sides of the empire-builder’s coin. Marchionne saw the opportunity during the financial crisis to snap up Chrysler as a distressed asset and use it to augment Fiat; Tavares followed in the footsteps of Carlos Ghosn as effectively the last guy in the global car business with the ambition to make an unruly colossus like Stellantis work. As Bloomberg makes clear, Tavares did not succeed, and in the publication’s reporting, crippled Stellantis through cost-cutting and mismanagement, seriously damaging the all-important Jeep brand in the process.
The tariff factor
Nothing about U.S. tariff policies is making Elkann’s job any easier. In this of course he isn’t alone: GM and Ford have each guided toward billions less in 2025 profits thanks to hits from the import duties. Japanese and German automakers are adjusting to a new normal, after decades of lowered trade barriers. Elkann hasn’t exactly failed to raise his family’s fortunes – they’re all much richer than they were when this crazy international adventure started.
But he’s still stuck with Stellantis, just as he was stuck with FCA and before that, with Fiat. And he’s been at it for 20 years – Elkann is about to enter his fifties, and he’s still tied to Fiat’s long legacy. On the plus side, the unending financial gyrations of the past two decades have greatly reduced Exor’s overall exposure to Stellantis (it amounts to less than 15 percent of holdings). On the negative side, the auto conglomerate is in trouble, and the traditional car business is looking to be a lot less profitable, if it’s ever consistently profitable at all, in the future. But this is the thing about family businesses, and Elkann knows it: they are very hard to manage, and equally difficult to quit.
