Into A World Without Marchionne

A new book details the 2018 crisis when Fiat Chrysler lost its “indispensable” chief executive.

- Tommaso Ebhardt

On the morning of July 20, 2018, a warm Friday, a Fiat Chrysler corporate jet took off from Turin, Italy, with Chairman John Elkann on board. For the second time in a week, Elkann, a scion of Fiat’s founding Agnelli family, was crossing the Alps, headed for the University Hospital Zurich to try to discover what was wrong with his chief executive officer, Sergio Marchionne. Three days earlier, Elkann had been denied entry to the hospital’s intensive-care unit by Marchionne’s doctors who said it would be a violation of the patient’s privacy. The chairman hadn’t received an update on how the CEO was recovering from surgery he’d undergone at the end of June. No one at the company knew he’d been scheduled for the procedure.

Elkann had one issue on his mind. The company had told investors in its 2017 annual report that Marchionne was “critical to the execution” of its strategy, high praise yet high risk. Fiat’s market value had grown tenfold under Marchionne. What would happen if the superstar CEO—who ran three of the family’s huge companies—was incapacitated? Elkann had started evaluating options on the evening of his first visit to the Zurich hospital, as he headed to the airport after a walk by the lake with Marchionne’s partner, Manuela Battezzato. This second visit would be fraught: The company’s second-quarter results were due in five days, and media speculation was mounting over the CEO’s condition. As Elkann passed through the glass doors of the hospital, he saw Battezzato and, after speaking with her, came to the realization that his CEO was never coming back.