John J. Raskob

"Raskob was not much interested in the making and marketing of goods or new products. In that sense, he was nothing like Henry Ford. He built platforms—in his case fi nancial platforms—that allowed companies to grow and consumers to buy."

"Raskob then talked Pierre du Pont into replacing Durant as GM president. In the early 1920s, they partnered with Alfred Sloan to rebuild General Motors. It was Raskob who fi gured out how to beat Henry Ford at his own game by betting on a consumer credit revolution and creating GM’s installment buying arm, GMAC, which allowed car dealers to fi ll their showrooms and millions of people to aff ord GM’s more expensive and stylish cars. Th en, to motivate and maintain the loyalty of GM’s extraordinary management team, most especially the irreplaceable Alfred Sloan, Raskob devised one of the fi rst corporate stock option plans. Th e business press dubbed it Raskob’s “millionaires’ club.” Th e press was not exaggerating; dozens of GM managers would accrue GM stock worth millions (including Raskob); Sloan, who took over as GM president in 1923, eventually made hundreds of millions of dollars. Th e business elite saw Raskob as a visionary who had fi gured out how to get managers of corporate America to act like owners; instead of working only for salary they were working for a share of the company’s profi ts. Raskob’s stock option plan for top managers became conventional wisdom in corporate America."

"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."

"Despite such publicity, much of what Raskob actually did was oft en mysterious to the American public. He never ran a major corporation. He never invented a noteworthy product. Even when he started up a new enterprise he almost never took public credit for his accomplishment. When he built the tallest skyscraper in the world—the Empire State Building—he did not name that building aft er himself, as his close friend and rival Walter Chrysler had done with his own venture. Raskob did not even name himself president of the corporation that owned and managed the building. He gave that honor to Al Smith, whose 1928 presidential bid Raskob had largely funded and who, in the aft ermath of defeat, needed a noteworthy position as balm to his wounded pride (and his empty wallet). Raskob never sought the limelight; he was the anti-Trump of his time."

"e drive to “do things,” lots of things, lay at the core of Raskob’s character. Raskob’s own family oft en wondered what made their pater familias tick. Like many of the great men of the second industrial revolution, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Raskob was driven not by greed or avarice, or by the desire for adulation and power. Raskob’s drive, at least in its rawest form, seemed to be almost physical. He loved to be, literally, in motion, careening from place to place and from opportunity to opportunity"

"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."

"4 Everybody Ought t o be Ric h to consumer. Raskob worked at the interstices of industry, fi nance, and—by the late 1910s—the booming new marketplace for consumer goods, specifi cally autos."

"Raskob was an architect of the capitalist system. He was fascinated by the fl ow of money, the workings of the credit markets, the processes by which value was given to company assets, real estate, and stock prices. Without formal education, he drilled down into company reports and made himself a master of bond divestures and equity off erings. His interests were anything but academic. In partnership with the great industrialists and fi nanciers of his time he put his knowledge to work: buying up companies, leveraging investments, creating new pools of credit for both the rich investor and the middle-class consumer, reorganizing corporations, plott ing hostile takeovers, fi nancing skyscrapers, and channeling money into the political system. Raskob was one of a handful of men in the United States who created the credit revolution at both the elite and the mass level that fueled America’s spectacular, world-leading economic growth. 9"

"Raskob had an exceptional talent for walking into a room and convincing hardnosed men, whether they were bankers or industrialists or politicians, that he was the harbinger of the next and most necessary step in the adventure upon which they had been waiting to embark."

"Introduction 7 their money and become shareholders in America’s booming corporate economy. “Everybody,” he said, “ought to be rich.” Before Raskob could launch his investment trust for the masses, the stock market broke and then crashed. Luckily for Raskob he had not realized his dream of taking and investing the savings of millions of working Americans in the stock market; if he had he would have lost it all."

"John J. Raskob, Charles M. Schwab, and Walter P. Chrysler."