In the late summer of 1935, a seaplane was coming in to land near Genoa when its propeller struck the pilot. The man, Edoardo Agnelli, heir to the Fiat automobile empire, was decapitated instantly. He was 33 years old. His son Gianni was just 14.

It was the first of a series of violent deaths that would mark the family for generations. Ten years later, Edoardo’s widow, Virginia, was killed when her car collided head-on with a US Army truck. In a single decade, three generations of Agnelli leadership were wiped out, leaving the teenager Gianni to carry the dynasty into the postwar era. But the family’s origin story had begun decades earlier, in 1866, with a middle-class boy named Giovanni Agnelli.

As a young cavalry officer stationed near the Austrian frontier, he sustained a six-inch saber wound during a routine training exercise. Forced into a period of recovery, he used the time to study the industrial machinery appearing in northern Italy’s factories. His fellow officers dismissed the obsession as vulgar, but Giovanni saw something they did not: the future of power lay not in aristocratic bloodlines or military honor, but in control of industrial production. He rejected his father’s expectation that he manage the family’s modest agricultural holdings.

Instead, he enrolled in engineering courses in Turin and apprenticed with a metalwork shop owner, learning cost accounting, supply chains, and production management. By 1894, he had concluded that automobile manufacturing offered the greatest opportunity in Italian commerce. On July 11, 1899, Giovanni and a small group of investors signed the articles of incorporation for Fiat, an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino. Giovanni’s personal contribution was a modest 400 lira.

Within three years, he had acquired majority control. By 1906, Fiat was manufacturing over a thousand vehicles a year and dominating the Italian market. His real genius, however, was not manufacturing. It was leverage.

He systematically acquired controlling stakes in the steel, rubber, and component suppliers that Fiat depended on, making rivals reliant on his network. In 1907, he established a holding company, IFI, to consolidate his assets while keeping strategic control in family hands. And he cultivated deep ties with government officials, positioning Fiat as essential to both Italian economic growth and national defense. By 1910, he was the most powerful industrial figure in Italy.

When revolutionary socialist unrest threatened private enterprise in the years after World War I, Giovanni saw an answer in a rising journalist named Benito Mussolini. He funded Mussolini’s newspaper and political ambitions before the March on Rome. Once in power, Mussolini returned the favor: Fiat received lucrative military contracts and protection from labor unrest, and Giovanni was appointed senator for life in 1923. The arrangement was a bargain over human dignity.

Fiat’s output soared by more than 400 percent between 1922 and 1929, while the fascist state systematically dismantled worker rights. Giovanni subsidized fascist publications and youth organizations, and accepted that his prosperity was built on the suppression of independent voices. He understood the collaboration was volatile, so he maintained overt loyalty while discreetly preparing for a political shift. That shift came with catastrophe.

When Mussolini entered World War II in June 1940, Fiat converted nearly 80 percent of its capacity to military production. Giovanni knew the war was unwinnable. He kept the machines running to satisfy the regime, but through intermediaries he also began discreetly supporting anti-fascist resistance groups, allowing members to hold jobs inside Fiat plants, sharing intelligence, and approving acts of sabotage that reduced military output. When northern Italy was liberated in April 1945, Allied authorities removed Giovanni from Fiat’s leadership pending an investigation into its wartime conduct.

Resistance leaders testified to his covert support. Investigators found evidence of deep collaboration but also of sabotage. In 1947, he was exonerated and allowed to reclaim control. He had learned a lesson that would define the family for a century: being indispensable was more powerful than being morally righteous.

The grandson who inherited this system was Gianni Agnelli. He became the public face of the dynasty, a playboy who leapt from helicopters into the Mediterranean, lunched with Jackie Kennedy, and once crashed his Ferrari on the French Riviera in 1952, shattering his leg. He survived, ended a secret romance with Winston Churchill’s former daughter-in-law, and married a noblewoman. But the limp stayed with him for life.

Gianni understood that the postwar economic boom demanded more than car manufacturing. Using Marshall Plan funding, Fiat built one of Europe’s most advanced plants, and in 1955 launched the Fiat 600, an affordable car for the Italian middle class. Within three years, it controlled 85 percent of the domestic market. Gianni then diversified aggressively, acquiring steel companies, telecommunications stakes, and a financing arm, SAVA, that allowed customers to buy Fiats on installment.

By 1965, the family’s wealth had surged by 300 percent, and Fiat controlled roughly 4. 4 percent of Italy’s total GDP. His most audacious move came in 1976, when Fiat became the first major Western corporation to build a complete automobile plant inside the Soviet Union. The deal was worth over $8 billion and employed 60,000 Soviet workers.

Gianni enlisted Italian Communist Party leaders for credibility with Moscow while reassuring NATO allies that strategic technology would not be transferred. At the same time, he expanded into Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Spain, and Yugoslavia, building a global network that by 1985 employed over 350,000 people. His political influence reached its peak during the 1978 kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. For 55 days, political leaders across the spectrum privately sought Gianni’s counsel.

He endorsed the government’s refusal to negotiate while quietly exploring whether foreign intelligence services could help locate Moro. Moro was executed anyway, but the crisis demonstrated how dependent Italian politics had become on Agnelli guidance. The family’s curse, however, continued to exact its price. In 1997, Gianni’s chosen successor, his nephew Giovannino, died of intestinal cancer at age 33.

Three years later, Gianni’s own son Edoardo drove to a bridge known as the suicide bridge and jumped 60 meters to his death. Gianni was broken. He died in January 2003. On his deathbed, he made a final decision: he bypassed his daughter Margherita and concentrated control in the hands of his 28-year-old grandson, John Elkann.

The choice triggered a war within the family. In 2007, Margherita sued her own son, claiming that $5 billion of her father’s estate had been hidden in offshore accounts and secret trusts. The bitter legal battle exposed the family’s art collection and financial structures to public scrutiny. The dynasty responded with its oldest defense: one king, one crown.

Other family members could receive dividends, but only John held the voting rights. John Elkann inherited a company on the brink of collapse. Fiat was losing money, labor costs were uncompetitive, and the industry was facing a technological revolution. In 2009, he engineered the rescue of Chrysler from bankruptcy, gaining control of the American market in exchange for technology and job guarantees.

By 2014, the combined company produced over 4. 8 million vehicles annually. In 2021, Fiat merged with the French automaker PSA to form Stellantis, becoming the world’s third-largest automaker by revenue. John then committed $35 billion to electric vehicle development, positioning the empire for the transition to mobility platforms, charging networks, and autonomous driving.

He also diversified through the family holding company Exor, acquiring stakes in The Economist, media companies, and luxury brands. Between 2010 and 2020, Exor’s portfolio grew by 180 percent, lifting the family’s estimated wealth above $15 billion. From a cavalry officer in 1899 to a digital industrialist in the 2020s, the Agnellis have survived fascism, two world wars, communism, terrorism, and their own tragedies. They made themselves too important to fail, converting industrial power into political influence and back again.

But the price was always paid in blood. The question now is whether the curse has finally been broken, or whether it is simply waiting for the next generation.