Today’s Morning Dump is a tale of two Fiat heirs. No, not Lapo and Ginevra. I’m talking about Stellantis and Ferrari. If you’re an employee of one, you probably just got a humongous bonus. If you’re an employee of the other, well…
I’ve already covered that Stellantis was going to take a huge charge this year to basically wash the Carlos Tavares out of its mouth. Today’s financial reports show a company that’s slowly recovering, but the lack of a bonus is going to be hard for many to swallow, and has less to do with all that nonsense than you’d think. On the other side of what was once FCA, Ferrari sold fewer cars and made more money, so it’s raining euros.
Workers of the world unite! Specifically, Tesla workers unite. Or don’t. It might cost you your job. The solution to all of this? If you sell cars in Europe, it might be China. Which, of course, is also the threat.
I Hope Stellantis Workers At Least Got A Pizza Party
This wasn’t a surprise, if that helps. New Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa already said the company was going to take a $26 billion charge over the company’s bad EV bets, poor quality, movement of engineering out of core offices, and all sorts of other terrible moves by the last guy.
Add it all up, and that, according to Stellantis and Filosa, becomes a major loss for 2025. The first loss in the company’s short existence:
“Our 2025 full year results reflect the cost of over-estimating the pace of the energy transition and of the need to reset our business around our customers’ freedom to choose from the full range of electric, hybrid and internal combustion technologies.”
“In the second half of the year we began to see initial, positive signs of progress with the early results of our drive to improve quality, strong execution of the launches of our new product wave and a return to top line growth. In 2026 our focus will be on continuing to close the execution gaps of the past, adding further momentum to our return to profitable growth.”
The company’s $26.3 billion loss is mostly due to that write-down. Did a large number of workers ask Stellantis to ship engineering jobs overseas? To get into a fight with its suppliers? To invest in EVs over hybrids? So far as I can tell, the workers did not.
While bonuses are down this year, UAW members at Ford will get roughly $6,800, and GM employees should pocket somewhere around $10,000. Stellantis workers will get nothing, and that’s probably a lot more due to tariffs, although all the bad product choices aren’t helping, as Automotive News reports:
Stellantis’ contract with the UAW pays $900 for every 1 percent of North American profit margin. For 2025, the company lost $2.2 billion in North America, for a margin of negative 3.1 percent.
“It is clear that 2025 was a very challenging year for Stellantis, reflecting the cost of a profound and necessary business reset to correct past decisions,” Stellantis said in a statement. “As the North America results did not meet the minimum thresholds defined in the 2023 UAW collective bargaining agreement, there will be no profit sharing paid to UAW-represented employees for 2025.”
[…]
Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump are among the reasons Stellantis’ margin evaporated in North America last year. The company had estimated its 2025 tariff bill to be $1.4 billion.
Presumably, without tariffs, the company might have found a way to make some sort of profit. Either way, it wasn’t going to be a great year for workers.
Ferrari Workers Get Up To $18,000 In Bonus
It was almost exactly 10 years ago that Ferrari was officially split off from FCA, ahead of its eventual transformation into Stellantis. Ferrari’s fate has done nothing but improve in the years since.
Just ask the workers!
Per Yahoo! Finance:
The company’s financial performance triggered what Ferrari calls a competitive annual award for its workforce in Italy. During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Benedetto Vigna confirmed that eligible employees could receive up to €14,900, or nearly $18,000 at current exchange rates. Approximately 5,000 people work for Ferrari in Italy. The bonus reflects the automaker’s focus on high-margin vehicles rather than overall production volume, a strategy that continues to drive profitability even when shipment totals fluctuate slightly year over year.
That’s a lotta tagliatelle al ragù battuto al coltello.
Tesla CEO Seems To Imply Repercussions If German Workers Switch Unions: Report
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to explain how super weird the TV show Dinosaurs was. Imagine All In The Family meets Jurassic Park. I guess? One of the best bits was that there was a show-within-the-show called Tricera-Cops and, for whatever reason, it does an extended bit about Marxism. You can see it at the end of this clip.
“You’ve been disenfranchised by the bourgeois power structure!”
Hilarious.
Anyway, Tesla has a unionized plant in Europe, because basically everything in Europe is unionized. The catch is that, instead of the typical IG Metall organization you’d find at a VW plant, the GigaBerlin factory has its own, quasi-management-supported workers council.
There’s an election coming up, and IG Metall wants in. This is, as Manager Magazin reports, where it gets weird:
Police operation at Tesla, charges of wiretapping, public prosecutor’s office investigating plant manager: The recent incidents at the Tesla factory in Grünheide sound almost too absurd to be true. In fact, however, they are the result of a long-standing dispute between the employer and the IG Metall union , which has escalated increasingly in recent weeks.
Both sides are ultimately concerned with employee participation in the company. Next week, from March 2nd to 4th, works council elections will take place at the Gigafactory for the third time. For the first time, the automaker in Brandenburg could have a works council led by a majority of union members.
It’s not a good time there, and if you ask some of the workers, they claim the current union is just a rubber stamp for management. If you ask the leadership of the current union, the outsiders are jerks trying to cause trouble.
What does CEO Elon Musk say? According to an article in Spiegel Business and Handelsblatt, he’s unsurprisingly siding with the current worker council. Here are the important quotes from the CEO:
Things certainly become more difficult when there are, so to speak, external organizations pushing Tesla in the wrong direction,” the CEO said in a video message to employees. “We won’t close the factory, but realistically, we won’t expand it either.”
Yeah, given how poor sales are in Europe, I can’t see Tesla expanding the plant for any reason.
BMW Might Import Cheap Minis To Europe Via China
With the EU walking back anti-dumping tariffs on Chinese automakers on a case-by-case basis, there might be an opening for Mini to import Chinese-built EVs to Europe at a lower and more reasonable price.
BMW and the European Commission are in talks about a possible minimum pricing model that could replace EU tariffs on the German carmaker’s Chinese-made Mini electric vehicles, Germany’s Handelsblatt business daily reported on Tuesday.
This follows an agreement struck between Brussels and Volkswagen earlier in February, under which the group’s SEAT/Cupra brand secured a tariff exemption for its all-electric Tavascan SUV coupe following months of discussions. Similar deals could follow, with Chinese carmakers also thought to be eyeing exemptions for their EU-bound EVs.
If you can’t beat’em, import’em.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
People are loving the KATSEYE, so enjoy some “Gabriela,” which is like a K-Pop “Jolene.”
The Big Question
Which automaker employees will get the biggest bonus for 2026?
Top photo: Warner Bros
My bonus was cut this year. “All salary making under X get full bonus, those over X get this years bonus split over 3 years plus a Y kicker for the inconvenience.”
Almost sounds like where I work last year they gave out the annual incentive (at 102%) but then cut out raises by ~1% and then sent us home in the summer for furloughs so the bonus and raises were moot point because they made us take unpaid days.
I feel the same will happen this year. As someone my level only gets a 5% for that annual incentive while peeps much higher up on the totem pole get like 25 or 30% bonuses which to me is just ass backwards way to do it. So those peeps already make a base salary that is x5 or more then my base salary but you also get a bonus that is my base salary?Ridiculous.
Our bonuses were down this year, and our manager flat out told us it was thanks to the tariffs we paid for the units we sold, imported from the inventor of the units in Germany. (And a couple x-rays we import from Taiwan but like 2-3 total.)
My Orange-loving boss still loves the Orange. I don’t get it.
They should seize and claw back whatever they gave Tavares and split that among the workers
Never happens… an ousted CEO at a company I once worked for got a $64 M golden parachute as they were laying off hourly and salaried workforce.
They could have fired me for 10% of that…
That Tricera-Cops bit was AMAZING. These days, every working person has been disenfranchised by the bourgeois power structure. The Epstein crew is a surprisingly big club, but you and I ain’t in it.
And the trick is that they have us too busy arguing about who uses which bathroom or plays which sport to see it.
eligible employees could receive up to €14,900, or nearly $18,000
So only no show employees whose last names are “Ferrari” are eligible?
I would bet most folks get a bonus. Its the “up to” portion that gives them plenty of leeway. Guessing most folks receive substantially less than the total amount listed depending on where they are in the organization.
So, they’re going to all get a fat bonus when the Whitehouse reinburses them for the illegal tariffs, right?
Right?
Cheque is in the mail. Trust them.
Some people were reasonably rude when I previously said the perception in Europe, particularly in France, was that the US part of Stellantis was a millstone around the neck which will drown the whole company.
Come results day and the write off in US was €17 billion, plus another €6 billion in Europe.
Those French unions and others knew what they were talking about.
And the boss spent a whole two hours in Paris when he deigned to visit Europe.
Shareholder revolts might be brewing.
And the longer this perception lasts, more people will look at Stellantis brands, and say I would rather buy elsewhere….
Especially as they have not yet convinced people that they can make engines which last longer than 50,000 km…
Those old Peugeot diesels with over 1 million km you see in Africa must be wondering how on earth it came to this.
Miss the old AMC 4.0L… Europe is an entirely different auto environment than the US.
“And the longer this perception lasts, more people will look at Stellantis brands, and say I would rather buy elsewhere….” for SURE I can say I would never, ever buy one. I think most people outside of Michigan would agree. Most of the ones I see around here I’m convinced are either rentals or company cars. I don’t know a single person who actually buys any Stellantis products as someone who has free will to choose any brand.
I have a coworker who buys new cars more often than I buy new shoes (I wish I was exaggerating). They love their Jeeps for reasons that are unfathomable to me since they’re invariably shitboxes even during their brief period of ownership. Of course they also never see offroad duty any worse than a moderately bumpy dirt road.
How interesting that the part of the company that was most ignored under the previous leadership has transformed in to the part of the company struggling the most to generate money, despite the US having effectively double the new cars per capita over the EU. The screwup is how they managed the US once they bought Mopar, not the inability of all Mopar to make any money.
TBH Mopar has been mis-managed since the “merger of equals”.
I agree. I’m a big Mopar fan. I love vintage Mopar over the other domestics. But I also think Ram is the best looking truck out there still today. I have an older but “late model” Ram 2500 and a first gen Durango in my family cars lineup right now. I have a first gen Dakota underpinning a body swapped custom truck. I would be really happy to see them finally really figure things out again.
My ’99 4.0 WJ was a gem (aside from the transmission). Ran it to 199k. It did have a number of late life electrical gremlins and RUST. My ’00 300M was a love/hate affair. RUST, and it devoured tires like no other car I owned. My old beater ’89 4.0 XJ was just a cockroach of a vehilce. RUST.
Elon: “What if we made the whole car out of bad faith arguments!?”
They can point fingers all they want at EVs. The accusations don’t match the facts. EV sales exploded in the EU.
How else could they claim that their lord and saviour, the 5.7L V8 Hemi, isn’t real if they don’t position EVs as the evil lord of the underworld?
While plenty of arguments can be made around them building EVs no one wants, thus their struggles in that market may be self inflicted, certain details are undeniable. The return of the v8 DID improve their sales. Their EVs HAVE struggled to get market share. No one is making that up. But exactly who’s EVs took most of that market share? It wasn’t US carmakers. It wasn’t German carmakers. That explosion is riding a wave of Chinese, or Chinese via European owner carmakers. There is much more nuance to this than “they only lost on EVs because they pretend EVs are bad”.
You could make those claims, but Citroen & Peugeot both have a line of vehicles with multiple powetrains of EV/ICE/Hybrid/PHEV that never came across the pond.
I’m not sure I understand your meaning. I conceded that much of Stellantis US woes are self inflicted (mostly thanks to Carlos Tavares). I’m perfectly happy to accept that there are various well designed powertrains in Europe they could have imported and haven’t yet, and probably should.
I’m just not sure how that is a counterpoint to the facts that the Hemi increased sales, and their EVs are currently boat anchors. They can run the Hemi and those European hybrids at the same time I imagine. If fact, I think that makes tons of sense.
My point was simply that Stellantis is global.
I was just making a swipe at their ability to make uncompetitive EVs in North America isn’t actually founded on any real fact that Stellantis, as whole, isn’t completely-incompetent-AF but that it’s mostly limited to the the Detroit-brand of Stellantis and with a new CEO pegging the turnaround on very publicly shouting HEMI and demonizing EVs.
I totally agree that they should have the EuroHybrids. They could literally double the Chrysler branded vehicles by having one.
I would be really interested to see Chrysler revived this way. A few EuroHybrids (nice term, I like it) with a bit of set dressing to become “Chrysler” (whatever that looks like now?). There’s other things I think might help in the future, but that seems like a fairly easy door to walk through for the short term.
I would hope they could succeed in the U.S. with EuroHybrids, but then I look at the Dodge Hornet and wonder.
Wanna bet the Stellantis C Suite still gets nice big bonuses?
I suppose that would depend on if they are bonused off of profit margin, like the UAW workers, or if they are bonused off other factors. If they are bonused of profit margin, then no, they will also not receive a bonus.
They’ll probably get 7 or 8 figure bonuses for “only” losing 26 billion instead of their (internally) projected 27 billion…
Profit from GM or Ford could be better if they didnt have the tariff drama from Regina George.
If Stellantis improved their PHEV offers, they would have an advantage but decided to kill it all. RAM EREV is late, Pacifica PHEV is gone, and the new Cherokee just entered the market with a hybrid where everyone else has a hybrid available and probably more reliable. Another frozen yogurt offer.
It took me a second, but *chef’s kiss* to this.
insert burn book meme
If they got a pizza party, guaranteed it was fucking Costco pizza because nothing says this is a Fuck You work event like Costco pizza.
Little Caesar’s enters the chat…
Honestly, I’d respect Little Caesars more as they are considerably smaller and you’d spend more per square foot once you got enough. Plus Crazy Bread, y0.
Jets pizza for me, I am done with Little Caesars on every damn kid birthday party.
Dont know about Jets but yeah – both are crap.
I miss Jets’ bbq chicken pizza. It did feel like pretty much the most unhealthy lunch option I could opt for, but you know, moderation and shit.
With delivery.
It was probably CiCi’s Pizza.
Who hurt you?
Fox’es Pizza Den FTW. Nasty stuff
Every time we go to the heart of Pennsyltucky we must visit Fox’s Pizza.
yeah, still pretty thick on the ground here for some unexplainable reason.
I feel this in my bones. Fox’es and a Sheetz MTO are must do’s on every trip.
Nah Stellantis is a Michigan automaker. It was Jets Pizza. In my years working for the other two of the “Big 2.5” it was always Jets.
Did they even say thank you?
There was definitely a word before “you”, but it certainly wasn’t “thank”.
Probably should take some copper and CAT’s home to offset that.
SO the ex ceo did a bad job and got $26 million out the door and the employees who actually did work for a living and had to do a good job got no bonuses. Wow we do really kiss rich a$$es as a society.
I guess Sergio took the right way out?
Yeah, that golden parachute stuff is pretty bad. I looked it up, and Stellantis has about 48,000 US employees. If that $26M had gone to them instead, it would have been about $540 bonus per. Not nothing, but not comparable to the other 2 companies either.
YES, I think that $540 and knowing that the boss that did this to them got nothing would have been something.
That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it?
– The Aristocrats!
Maybe a pajama day?
Dinosaurs ran for 4 seasons. What a time.
Also, Tesla saying if the union moves into the German plant.
“realistically, we also will not expand.”
Kind of like when I announced I would not be having relations with Elle McPherson.
If I don’t get a pay raise, I realistically will not be traveling to Mars.
See I can do it to!
And two of those seasons were proper, 20+ episode pre-2000’s seasons, at that.
And here I am still waiting for a fourth season of The Orville (aka TNG 2.0)
500 cigarettes?
They did, however, get a one year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club.
Anyone looking for last minute gift ideas?
It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
That it is, Jack.
Surely the C suite isn’t getting their usual bonuses either, right? That’s totally how this works!
I’m going to assume that they took the opportunity to completely write off those losses for 2025 so they can show their 2026 growth targets and get big payouts.
I can’t comprehend what it must be like to get a company bonus. 10K would be almost life changing. Wild.
Subtract 30-40% for taxes. Still life changing?
In the US, being federally taxed (not to be confused with withholding) over 30% means a single filer over about 200k income (adjusted) or a married filer over about 400k, I would imagine a 10k bonus to not be all that life changing.
While true, total reductions would also include taxes from many if not most states, workers comp funds, and the three or four other categories of government takings. So while not 40%, high 20%s is likely common for many people.
It would buy me a nicer car than I typically purchase, so there is that.
My comment was heavily laced with snark so not meant to be taken too seriously but you are correct. We’d also need to take effective rates into account rather than marginal but that would mean way more effort than I’m willing to do on a Thursday morning. lol
I’ve been a bonus eligible employee a few times and 10k (pretax) would be well above the average I ever got but any bonus is better than a sharp stick in the eye, for sure.
Thats fair. I’ve also gotten a bonus a few times, but if its been above 3 figures it was by pennies. Nothing like these guys are discussing.
An extra $6,000 into a house downpayment fund? Maybe it’s not life changing, but life accelerating for sure. An extra $6,000 to pay off that credit card debt? That very well could be life changing. Remember that most people can’t afford an emergency expense, so even if they end up having to put it on the credit card, at least that would have room on the card for it.
If 10k is life changing, he’s not in a 30%+ bracket. Let the man dream.
This is a good point. Mea culpa.
I’ve received a few bonuses of at least $10k. If the money is properly managed and received early in life, it can be life changing. Mostly just getting out of debt or saving it to avoid financing a car or home improvement project has long lasting benefits.
I used mine to buy my wife new appliances and me an aftermarket set of new wheels/tires for my truck. I also gave her a pearl necklace but that was free.
I was the only person in the theater who laughed at this joke:
https://youtu.be/-UbB-Q1Xunw?si=7ULFNNAObmpJvomC
Bingo! Thats exactly it
Obviously got the joke, but there was a chance you weren’t also making the movie reference. It was immediately where my mind went.
Ferrari’s doing well, making a profit, and have a successful WEC program on top of that?
According to the old Top Gear bit, Hamilton and Leclerc are doomed.
Which is going to be doubly crushing because Bahrain testing was the first time I’ve seen Hamilton happy since wearing red and Charles happy in, this decade?
As a steel buyer this shit is really starting to suck. We’re past the wait and see while burning our inventory phase and in the well this is the new normal so suck it up phase.
So, price and demand have gone up domestically with absolutely no change to capacity. Who knew the economy wasn’t a light switch?!
As a machine and tractor attachment buyer, I second that it is really starting to suck. Bought two buckets last week for what would have bought me a stump grinder or hammer in the past.
You’re both wrong. The economy, and AMERICA, are great, and have never been better. Your personal realities and experiences are not real. Your economic problems and costs have been solved, and they are not problems anymore.
/ I heard that somewhere.
We should celebrate with the cheapest steak prices in history!
Those in specific industries that are shielded by tariffs are going gangbusters.
It’s everyone else that gets effed, sans lube.
/not sarcasm
Some financial people I follow have been sounding the alarm about this for a while. Everybody has been replacing inventory at a slower rate than they sell it to try to keep costs from totally skyrocketing, but if the tariffs don’t go away soon there’s going to be a double whammy of needing to replace a ton of inventory and having to do it at increased cost. You can only kick the can so far down the road before the metal from the can is worth more than gold.
Stellantis contributed to Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee – how’s that working out?
Idk but the workers are eating the losses which sure sounds like capitalism to me!
The workers literally had a contracted goal that didn’t get met? Don’t forget, the union agreed to those terms. This isn’t some onesided screwing of the little guy. Its everyone getting exactly what they agreed to, from reasonably similar power levels if I’m to understand unions correctly.
It surely sank them in North America, long term.
They are having the day they voted for.
I’m picturing literal checks for zero dollars. With Trump’s signature on them, of course.
“some people say it couldn’t be done”
I used to work for a company that had profit sharing every month. They would announce over the public address system in all the buildings the profit share percentage right before we got the paycheck with the bonus. There was a stretch where the company was doing particularly poorly and we would get a lot announcements for 0.2% or 0% (loss that month) until managment decided it would be better for moral if they just stopped making the PA announcements. Not surprisingly I was eventually laid off from that employer.
The math just ain’t mathing for me. I think the tarriffs are dumb as fuck, but the headline seems a bit crazy given that clearly the bulk of the losses were because of the predecessors poor leadership.
2.2-1.4 = .8. By that math they would have lost just under one billion WITHOUT Tariffs. So yes, I agree that the math aint mathing. Matt says that without Tariffs there would have been profit, but how? They still showed a billion in losses, and that would still translate to zero bonus for Stellantis North America. I get there are lots of reasons to blame the President for stuff, but this one seems like it was happening regardless?
I’m not an economist, but couldn’t that other .8 billion be attributed to other increased costs, and decreased revenues from the tariffs? The 1.4 billion is the actual amount Stellantis paid to the US government, not the total hit from other tariff-related factors.
Typically, a publicly traded company will attribute any dollar they can to losses outside of their control, making them look better to the investors. So if those losses can be traced back to tariffs, I would expect them to say it. Could it be? Sure, it could be. But it would be very odd for Stellantis not to point that out and include it with the other 1.4B.
Come on. You don’t bad mouth the regime. Everyone knows it’s US tariffs right now taking a chunk out of the global economy…it’s all the uncertainty and TACO going on.
Even if that’s true, it is still dwarfed by the companies EV choices and previous leadership.
Again, I hate tariffs. But in this instance, the headline and the conclusion of that subsection are putting an awful lot of weight on tariffs when a lot more should be placed on the old leadership.
Do I really care that much? No. It’s just that there isn’t a lack of data to show tariffs suck ass. And giving them too much infamy in this situation doesn’t exactly build credibility.
Yeah, not sure it points to a positive profit if the tariffs weren’t there. It does seem like a lot of cleaning house to make up for the sins of the previous leadership, but the tariffs certainly weren’t helping. They may have also added some uncertainty that prevented incentive that would have moved more product from the lots, but that’s speculation.
In any case, I wouldn’t be expecting significant checks for 2026 either…..
The uncertainty is not speculation. It’s playing out right now, in front of you, in many ways.
That is a fair critique. I will fix it. Thank you.