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
Seriously? Are we still talking about Tesla? The company that formerly built a whole bunch of crappy EVs, and now builds far fewer of them? Buy a Tesla, support a Na*i. Full stop. As in, “fully stop them.”
“It’s a subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club.”
“It’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year through, Clark. “
Just posting to mention I had such a tv crush on Beverly D’Angelo back in the day. 😉
Also, I never though that Chevy Chase was all that funny, on SNL, or in the Vacation/Fletch movies. But that’s just MHO.
Chevy Chase is a medium talent.
(A legendary burn by Bill Murray)
That’s a generous appraisal by Mr. Murray. But what do I know?
Supposedly we’re tired of winning. If this is what winning looks like I can see why you’d be tired of it.
I am glad I got an exceeds on my performance review in a year down year where we won’t be getting any annual incentives or bonuses most likely. So for the question I do not think VW will be giving any big bonuses this year haha. If we are going by amount I think Ferrari is hard to beat at 18k but if you were to even it out across employees it will probably be GM or Toyota (if they give bonuses)
Toyota gives out fairly decent bonuses to hourly Team Members. Pays out a few times a year. My BiL is always happy when it hits.
Didn’t Stellantis give out $20k in bonuses in 2023-24 total?
I’ve worked for my current employer for 10 years. Our bonus is based percent Return on Sales.
2021 – 2.5%
2022 – 8.0%
2023 – 11.5%
2024 – 13.0% (Highest in my 10 years)
2025 – 0.00% (Not official but the reported RoS is below the minimum to get any bonus)
That drop in RoS is almost 100% based on tariff costs combined with stupid production changes made to avoid paying tariffs. (Things like building vehicles for Canada in Mexico to avoid the retaliatory tariff that Canada has on US vehicles)
I got two or maybe three bonuses out of Lotus in 25 years, despite working for the part of the company that made money most of those years.
I’m not including the free turkey at Christmas, because getting a frozen bird that won’t fit in your freezer a couple of weeks before Christmas is more of a prank than a gift.
I hope the people who successfully implemented the largest redundancy project in the history of the company will get the bonus they deserve, especially the one who asked me several times during my hearing if I was “happy to proceed”. I was not.
What is this “Bonus” of which you speak?
Ha. I am an audio visual contractor and 25 had no bonuses to give. Fortunately this coming year I am getting work from an integrator who does corporate lawyer and money management corporations. What a landscape change. Higher ed and k12 integrators are not doing well. In fact, a couple long-standing NE companies got bought out by national corporates.
Ah. Dinosaurs! My wife and I loved that show. My son was born during the last season. I wish I had taped them to replay when he got old enough to appreciate some of the humor. Fortunately, it’s all on YouTube now.
i remember rushing home to catch dinosaurs on TGIF as a kid. the episode about chucking the grandma off in the tar pit in this weird form of euthanasia because of age was wild, especially because earl was so gung ho and pumped about it. the final episode where they were huddled around watching it snow was so bleak and traumatizing lol.
My wife could do an uncanny version of Baby Sinclair. That show was so full of Easter eggs and I just now realized that their last name was one. Sometimes it amazed me how long it takes for me to find some of these things. :-/
Notthemama!
Again!
I loved the show as a kid, not really understanding it. Seeing clips of it today, I’m surprised by its genius. I specifically remember episodes about unions and media propaganda.
It’s a lot like the Warner Bros. and Jay Ward cartoons of my childhood.
Huh. How do you explain 5 figure payouts at gm ?
GM is not Stellantis, that’s why.
Maybe they can all get special Trump Gold cards that entitle the holder to 5% off their meal with purchase of cocktail at the Trump Grill in New York? Valid only for lunch, Monday to Friday excluding holidays, limit of two people per check
If Stellantis survives 3 more years it will be surprising. With all the nationalism popping up everywhere I don’t see anyone offering them a bail out other then the EU but they would probably say they have to split off or sell their north American operations and they really should.
Just let the Chinese take it and do something interesting with it. Though with the way things are going it would probably be sold to the Saudis or UAE wealth fund. Maybe of the PE rocks can further enshitify it.
When the Italians really starting doing things they put those huge ugly chrome “RAM” on the back of the trucks no one buying them wanted that. It was almost like “yeah my cousin Vinny in Jersey said this is classy”. They were told a small truck would do great in the American market they said no and they knew the American market better then Americans. They don’t know what they are doing globally but they do the stupidest things in the US. Now they are back to an 07 situation waiting for the 08 situation to drop.
So it was a bunch of Italians telling the entire US teams what to do and there was no feedback from them? Or there weren’t any Americans in the leadership?
The Italians had final say. I’m sure there was feedback at some level but probably never made it past the ass kissing management interfacing with the Italians. Outside American consultants told the Italians directly and they said no there is no market for that in the US. Maverick cought them off guard they could have had 3 to 5 years on Ford but didn’t listen.
Is anyone tracking exec bonuses at Stellantis? I wonder what Directors and above are getting.
They’re a publicly traded company. All salaries for the upper management are public knowledge.
I’m looking at some data from 2024 and their Directors are making between 220,000-270,000 Euro base salary with bonuses up to 20,000 Euro.
Huh, thought it would be more.
Those are “just” Directors. There’s probably another 4 or 5 layers of management above that including VPs and then the CEO.
Also, bonus?? What is that?? I’ve worked in the public sector for a long time but have never in my professional career gotten a bonus. Hurrah for those who do get them!
Same – never heard of bonuses. I think it’s great that people get them don’t get me wrong, but I would never count on one as part of my income.
My company offers performance based bonuses which, strangely, people have a hard time meeting the threshold for. I wonder why that is…
One of my girlfriend’s coworkers got let go two weeks ago.
…Exactly one week before he was supposed to receive his $20,000 signing bonus after a year of service.
I’d be looking for a lawyer on that one
Yep,he can use the 20k to pay the lawyer.
Seriously? My bonus last year paid for the car I took on Power Tour, and the bulk of my new electrical service when my circuit breaker decided to overheat and fail
That’s awesome. My job has other benefits – low stress, good benefits, a pension – but it definitely doesn’t come with bonuses. Even when I worked in the auto industry I never got one. When I was in engineering school I worked at a product design place for a couple of years and now that I think of it I got a small bonus there once. If I knew I had a year-end bonus coming that was big enough to pay for a car I’d be awfully tempted to use it for playing-with-cars money, but I’d likely put most of it into my investment accounts.
Same.
The entire plot of Christmas Vacation is alien to me. Plan a major purchase around a year end bonus? No fricking way.
I’ve been promised a bonus about 20 times in my career. Actual times I got one? 3. Times it was over $20? 2. Times it was over $1000? 0.
I mean good for people that get them, but they aren’t part of my life.
Yes / No. Both companies I’ve worked for that had the possibility of a sizeable bonus implemented them in a pay realignment where they cut base salary and then added the bonus. Theoretically on an average year the total pay would be the same and higher on a good years but in both companies the requirements to earn that bonus quickly increase so that my average pay was less.
Then there is the unpredictability vs straight wages.
Bummer. I had a salaried job, but when the new owners killed the business, I got kicked to hourly for $15k less and suddenly I wasn’t asked to work late. Found out on my vacation when the deposit to my bank was way less
Hourly is the way to go. Salary pay should be illegal.
In any dispute between Tesla/Musk and a union,I know who I side with in less time that it takes me to spell “gesellschaft”