As an automotive journalist, I am forced to spend a truly unholy amount of time considering men like Elon Musk — men whose talents are often outshined by the consistently obnoxious secondhand embarrassment-inducing things they do. Musk, though, isn’t the only automotive executive who has subjected the world to his tomfoolery. There have been plenty since the dawn of the car, and it’s time we recognize them for their crimes against sensibility, too.
2 / 9
Malcolm Bricklin had his hand in a lot of different pots throughout his life. He found success by creating a supply store franchise at 19 and by introducing Subaru to the Americas. However, his legacy was also loaded with controversy. Take the Bricklin SV-1, for example, a vehicle that was supposed to be crafted with maximum safety in mind. He intended to bring his manufacturing facility to New Brunswick, Canada, which had a struggling economy — but Bricklin’s total lack of understanding of the automotive world failed to bring any results. Around 3,000 cars were built with tons of Canadian financial assistance, which left Bricklin’s name a dark mark in the auto industry.
It didn’t help that he sought to recover from that by bringing the Yugo to America.
3 / 9
While he no doubt remains an icon of both the automotive and motorsport worlds, Enzo Ferrari was a truly insufferable human. Drivers who raced for him accused him of intentionally creating debilitating psychological pressures that Ferrari believed would make them better drivers. That insistence on pushing oneself resulted in the deaths of eight promising drivers between 1955 and 1971, and his autocratic style of managing his company has resulted in a complicated legacy.
4 / 9
Roger Smith is generally known as one of the worst American CEOs of all time, and he didn’t come by that title lightly. While at the head of GM, Smith tried to recoup the company’s losses but merely ended up contributing to them instead. He reorganized the entire company, which came with plenty of burned bridges that further contributed to GM’s downfall. Then, he went ahead and transformed every brand under the GM banner into boring, lookalike copies of one another that completely destroyed the unique features of each brand. To put it pretty simply, Smith is one of the first auto executives that turned every car into a copy of the other, predating our sea of similar-looking crossovers and SUVs today.
5 / 9
The Carlos Ghosn saga seemed to last an eternity. He was arrested in November of 2018 for under-reporting his salary and misusing company assets, at which point he was dismissed as Nissan’s chairman. Ghosn was then ousted from just about all of his positions of power, and he proceeded to flee from Japan to Lebanon to avoid charges. His extremely shady behavior earned him a place on this list of the insufferable.
6 / 9
William C. Durant was one of those men who was born with money and never quite realized that his lavish lifestyle would set him up as a target of disdain for years to come. Durant’s largest insufferable offense was constructing a castle in Roscommon, Michigan that then mysteriously burned down before the family ever got a chance to live in it — all during the post-WWI and Great Depression era.
7 / 9
Growing up in Michigan, I learned a lot about all of the great inventions that Henry Ford contributed to our capitalist economy, but history tends to skim over the fact that Ford was an exceptionally shitty human being. Not only was he anti-semitic, but he was so publicly hateful that even Adolf Hitler looked up to him. He also hated jazz music, in large part because it was popular with the Black community.
All of that is awful, but perhaps the most insufferably thing about Henry Ford is the fact that many folks are keen to gloss over his hateful past in an effort to uphold Ford as a genius of the automotive realm.
8 / 9
We here at Jalopnik debated whether or not we’d include Elon Musk in this slideshow, since he mostly just bought his way into fame with Tesla — but we’d be remiss to leave out the king of the insufferable. While Musk and Tesla have done much for the electric car world, the company’s CEO has routinely proved to be the most obnoxious man on the internet with his bad tweets and memes that are generally at least three years behind the trend. He’ll go down in history not just as the man who reinvented the electric car, but who singlehandedly killed all of the giggle-factor behind 69 and 420 and never shut the hell up online — to the point where his tweets have been the subject of multiple lawsuits. Fame is, indeed, a double-edged sword.
It does make me wonder how many more auto execs would have made it onto this list if only they’d had an active Twitter account.