Dieter Zetsche almost single-handedly destroyed Chrysler. They came in with a supposed “merger of equals”, but in reality they came in and gutted Chrysler, took their capital and bought out a large chunk of the domestic medium and heavy truck market, and dumped the corpse on some private equity firm to chew on the bones.
In the 1990’s Chrysler was making money hand over fist, with unheard of margins for an automaker, and they were sitting on a lot of cash.
All Daimler-Benz was interested in was using all of that capital to break into the north american diesel truck market. And man did they.
What are you talking about? The Chrysler SNAFU was under Schrempp. And it cost Daimler billions.