I am sure if there was a simpler way Ford would have done it.

The obvious reason is that VW either (a) doesn't want to sell it or (b) wants to retain IP.

I doubt they can buy VW. The German government has an interest and Porsche most of the rest.

I think he meant buying VW’s stake in Argo AI. Not buying VW itself.

I do kinda love that they interpreted it that way though.

I’m picturing some coked out Ford exec screaming at his vp of finance “do we or do we have enough money to buy VW??!”

They don’t. But it’s not like anyone could buy VW it’s partially owned by the state and the trade unions could easily block it.

All of that is reflected in VWs share price. Without all this ‘socialism’ VW could probably easily buy Ford itself, maybe even GM.

Porsche is the majority shareholder in VW and VW itself owns 75% of Porsche (100% before the IPO)

Wait, what?! How can you have cycles in an ownership graph?

Ah, answering my own question, it seems to be called "circular ownership" and while it can sometimes occur from a long history of mergers and acquisitions (Samsung seems to be such a case), its generally a tax dodge or to mask ownership? At least, the top hits I see are all talking about it as a classic way to obscure oligarch ownership and things.

Genuinely curious who actually gets to make the decisions.

One important part of the answer is that there are two „Porsches“, a holding and a car manufacturer. It is also complicated though and there is much speculation who has how much influence.

yeah, but what if you can make them hurt and restart the business?

sometimes corporate leadership like to do petty things like this at huge cost

Huge cost? The board won't fire them for misspending a measly 5% of the their cash hoard. (" Ford Motor cash on hand for the quarter ending December 31, 2022 was $44.070B, a 11.14% decline year-over-year.")

They wrote off 7.3B because of Rivian and still no one got fired.

What huge cost?

Realizing a loss isn't bad, it only recognizes that money you have already spent is lost, it doesn't actually cost you anything and it's a nice tax write-off. If you can do that and you get to get keep the engineers, why not do that instead of keeping some fictional value for it on your balance sheet?

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