Pierre du Pont

"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."

"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."