DuPont Company

"Raskob’s total dedication to the DuPont Company won him Pierre’s love; his consistently successful fi nancial strategies earned him the trust and respect of the rest of the men who ran the nation’s largest explosives company. So when Raskob decided in 1915 that the sputt ering new General Motors Company represented the greatest fi nancial opportunity he had ever seen, Pierre and the rest of the DuPont men agreed to do what John recommended. Over time, Raskob wagered tens of millions of DuPont money, representing a sizable portion of the extraordinary profi ts the company had accrued from selling its deadly wares during the Great War, to fi nance the General Motors Company. Without DuPont’s massive infusion of capital, General Motors could not have survived. As the business press of the era reported, it was Raskob, and Raskob alone, who brought the DuPont millions to GM."

"To safeguard those millions, Raskob left his position as the chief fi nancial offi cer of the DuPont Company to take over GM’s fi nances. Billy Durant, GM’s founder, became Raskob’s new partner in corporate adventure. Raskob found the capital Durant said he needed to grow the business. Quickly enough, Raskob discovered that his new partner could not have been more diff erent than the old one. Pierre du Pont was a rock steady, by-the-numbers corporate strategist. Durant had risk-taking zest and dreamed of every American family owning one or even two gleaming cars. Together, he and Durant were building not just a company but a new industry, a new way of life."

"When Raskob was barely out of his teenage years he partnered with Pierre du Pont to create one of the world’s greatest business corporations. In 1902, Raskob worked side-by-side with the young Pierre du Pont to engineer the leveraged buyout of the DuPont Company, then a mid-sized family-owned explosive powders company operating in an illegal industry-wide cartel. Pierre and two of his capable cousins bought the creaky family business from their moribund elders for just $2,100 in cash. John and Pierre fi gured out how to fi nance the other $14 million. Th en the unlikely partners, one a self-taught, small-town Catholic boy and the other an MIT-educated scion of a storied and wealthy family, craft ed and deployed a sophisticated array of debt instruments to raise millions more to take control of the explosives industry, invest in research and innovation, reorganize every aspect of the corporation’s operations, and lay the groundwork for DuPont’s industrial empire."