RIP

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by rudy235

Ferdinand Piëch

Broken link. Rest in Peace... (the link I mean, about the man, I don't know if I should be sad or happy... personal reasons). What a pity, no punchbugs anymore?

[rudy235]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Broken link. Rest in Peace... (the link I mean, about the man, I don't know if I should be sad or happy... personal reasons). What a pity, no punchbugs anymore?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/b...sultPosition=1

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019...y=90&auto=webp

Try this pair Sorry!

[Dr Sardonicus]

Leslie Gelb

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by rudy235

Ferdinand Piëch

Also that page; page not found.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Links to Ferdinand Piëch obituaries at Associated Press, LA Times and The BBC should work.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

Links to Ferdinand Piëch obituaries at Associated Press, LA Times and The BBC should work.

Thanks - I only read the AP one, which does not address the lingering question "what did Piëch know about the diesel-emissions cheating and when did he know it?"

The article also does not mention an interesting and tragic twist in Porsche's failed 2008 hostile takeover attempt of VW, namely that Porsche's gobbling up so many of the available shares with borrowed money led to a ferocious short squeeze (in which investors who had shorted VW by buying puts, effectively borrowing shares from holders and selling them into the market in hopes of buying them back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference, were suddenly faced with margin calls on their now-worthless puts and forced to buy back the borrowed shares at tremendously higher sky's-the-limit prices) which ruined German billionaire industrialist Adolf Merckle and led to his suicide-by-train.

[kladner]

My partner worked for a company on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A clever rhyme from those days is,

"He who sells what isn't hisn
Must buy it back or go to prison."

As for Merkle, while I generally have sympathy for those driven to suicide, I have contempt for those who make another person the unwilling instrument of their demise. Someone jumping in front of a train is something engineers dread.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

<snip>
The article also does not mention an interesting and tragic twist in Porsche's failed 2008 hostile takeover attempt of VW, namely that Porsche's gobbling up so many of the available shares with borrowed money led to a ferocious short squeeze (in which investors who had shorted VW by buying puts, effectively borrowing shares from holders and selling them into the market in hopes of buying them back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference, were suddenly faced with margin calls on their now-worthless puts and forced to buy back the borrowed shares at tremendously higher sky's-the-limit prices) which ruined German billionaire industrialist Adolf Merckle and led to his suicide-by-train.

According to this contemporaneous article, he was far from financially ruined.

Shortly before 5pm on Monday night [January 5, 2009], Adolf Merckle quietly put on his coat, told his wife "I have to go to the office for a while", and drove to a railway embankment near his home, where he lay on the frozen tracks and waited patiently for death.
<snip>
What baffles Merckle's friends most of all about his death is that he was by no means ruined. True, his holding company had lost £400 million by betting on the falling price of VW shares in October, just before Porsche announced that it had secretly built up a controlling stake in the company and sent share prices rocketing.

Yet Merckle's personal fortune still stood at around £6 billion and, on the day he killed himself, he had successfully negotiated a £360 million bridging loan to keep his holding company, VEM Vermogensverwaltung, afloat.
<snip>
Even if Merckle had sold off several companies, the bulk of his empire would have remained intact – but his creditors had also made it clear that the bridging loan was conditional on his son Ludwig, named after Merckle's father, stepping down as director of VEM.

Was this the final indignity which tipped Merckle over the edge?

Commentators in Germany have suggested that Merckle, steeped in the family business from the day he was born, regarded the duty to pass the torch on to his children as his most important role in life. For his son to be given his marching orders by the banks was surely, to him, the ultimate failure.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Ryan Diviney

[xilman]

Robert Mugabe

[Dr Sardonicus]

Diet Eman