William Crapo Durant built General Motors on speed, leverage, and chaos, and the empire consumed him in return. Born in 1861 in Boston but raised in Flint, Michigan, Durant was a college dropout with a gift for salesmanship. He made his first fortune in the carriage business before turning to automobiles in 1904, taking over the struggling Buick Motor Company. He did not simply want to build cars; he wanted to consolidate the entire industry under one roof.

In 1908, he founded General Motors, purchasing Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland, and dozens of parts suppliers in a whirlwind of leveraged buyouts and stock swaps. The explosive growth came at a cost. Durant paid little attention to engineering standards or safety in his rush to acquire every manufacturer in sight. Early automobiles were inherently dangerous machines, prone to rollovers, brake failures, and engine explosions.

Under Durant’s manic leadership, the focus was on production numbers and stock prices rather than product refinement. The consumer effectively became the test pilot. The tragedy reached into his own bloodline. His son, Clifford Durant, was a playboy racer who chased adrenaline at tracks like the Indianapolis 500, often driving the Chevrolets and Buicks his father’s company produced.

Clifford’s life unravelled through health problems, alcoholism, and failed marriages. He died in 1931 at age forty-one, a grim foreshadowing of the toll the automobile would take on American families. Durant lost control of General Motors for the first time in 1910 to bankers who balked at his spending. He clawed his way back in 1916 with the help of the Chevrolet brand, but his second reign was as chaotic as his first.

The recession of 1920 exposed his overleveraged position. In a desperate bid to support the company’s stock price, he bought millions of dollars worth of GM shares on margin. When the price kept falling, he was wiped out. The DuPont family and Alfred P.

Sloan forced him out. His final chapter was profound tragedy. After being ousted, he attempted a comeback with Durant Motors, but the Great Depression delivered the final blow. The man who had once controlled a billion-dollar enterprise filed for bankruptcy in 1936, listing assets of $250 in clothes and debts of nearly $1 million.

He was reduced to managing a bowling alley in Flint and subsisting on a small pension provided by Alfred Sloan and Walter Chrysler, men who had once been his subordinates. He died in 1947 in a modest New York City apartment, virtually forgotten. The creator was cannibalized by his creation. Durant’s disastrous reign convinced the incoming leadership that emotion and humanity had no place in the boardroom.

Alfred Pritchard Sloan, an electrical engineer by training, took over in the early 1920s. Where Durant viewed the car as a miracle of motion, Sloan viewed it as a unit of profit. He reorganized the sprawling collection of car companies into a disciplined hierarchy of brands, famously articulated as a car for every purse and purpose. Under Sloan’s tenure, General Motors became the largest corporation on Earth.

But Sloan’s system came at a harrowing human cost. He perfected the concept of dynamic obsolescence, annual model changes designed to make consumers feel their vehicles were outdated long before they were mechanically worn. Style, chrome, and cosmetic updates were prioritized over engineering durability and safety innovations. When engineers proposed safety glass, padded dashboards, or seat belts in the 1930s and 1940s, these innovations were frequently rejected by finance committees as unnecessary costs that did not drive sales.

The consumer was viewed not as a human being to be protected, but as a wallet to be opened. The factories themselves became battlegrounds. In his relentless pursuit of return on investment, Sloan reduced the human worker to a variable cost to be minimized. The speed-up, increasing the assembly line’s pace to unbearable levels, resulted in maimed limbs, exhaustion, and fatalities recorded in corporate ledgers with the same detachment as the cost of steel.

During the Flint sit-down strike of 1936 to 1937, Sloan refused to meet with workers demanding fair wages and slower line speeds, urging the government to intervene with force. Sloan created a culture where open dissent was viewed as disloyalty and bad news was systematically filtered out before it reached the executive suite. Managers learned to tacitly approve risky decisions without explicitly saying yes. They would simply nod, acknowledging directives to cut costs or speed up production while maintaining plausible deniability.

This culture, later known as the GM nod, meant no single individual could be held responsible for a disaster. Responsibility was diluted across dozens of committees until it evaporated. Sloan died in 1966, passing away peacefully at age ninety, a stark contrast to Durant’s lonely end. His name now adorns hospitals and the elite Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Yet his legacy was haunted by what he suppressed. In the 1960s, terrified by Ralph Nader’s revelations in Unsafe at Any Speed, General Motors did not fix its cars. It attempted to destroy the man. The company hired private investigators to tail the young lawyer, tap his phone, and dig for dirt.

They even allegedly deployed young women to approach him in public places, hoping to entrap him in a scandal. The plan backfired spectacularly. Nader sued for invasion of privacy, winning a $425,000 settlement that he used to fund the consumer safety groups that would haunt GM for decades. The detachment reached its zenith in the early twenty-first century with the ignition switch scandal.

At the center was a small plastic component installed in millions of compact cars like the Chevrolet Cobalt, Saturn Ion, and Pontiac G5. The switch possessed a fatal flaw. If jostled by a heavy keychain, a knee bump, or a sudden vibration from a pothole, the torque was too low to hold the key in place. It would slip from run to accessory or off while the car was travelling at highway speed.

The engine would cut out, killing power steering and power brakes. When the key moved to off, the sensing diagnostic module lost power, rendering the airbag system completely useless. The driver was left with no control to avoid the crash and no protection when the impact occurred. GM engineers were aware of the switch’s low torque as early as 2001.

By 2004, customers began complaining of stalling engines. Engineers recreated the problem during test drives. A problem resolution tracking system inquiry was opened, and a solution was proposed: modify the switch to increase torque. The inquiry was closed with no action.

The cost to fix the switch was estimated at 57 cents per vehicle. The tooling cost was approximately $400,000. Managers determined these costs were too high compared to the projected cost of warranty repairs. They did not factor in the cost of human life.

They chose the 57 cents. Ray DeGiorgio, the lead design engineer for the Cobalt’s ignition switch, made matters worse. In 2006, he quietly signed off on a change to the switch design that increased the torque and lengthened the detent plunger, effectively fixing the slipping problem in new vehicles. But he did not change the part number.

In the rigid world of automotive manufacturing, a change in form, fit, or function mandates a new part number. By keeping the old number, DeGiorgio buried the evidence. Mechanics, crash investigators, and federal regulators looking at a defective 2005 switch and a functional 2008 switch saw the same part number and assumed the parts were identical. The human cost of this deception is best illustrated by the case of Candace Anderson.

In 2004, the twenty-one-year-old was driving her Saturn Ion when the ignition slipped, disabling the airbags and crashing the car into a tree. Her boyfriend died instantly next to her. Because no defect was publicly known, police blamed Anderson. Crushed by guilt, she accepted a plea deal, pleading guilty to criminally negligent homicide.

For ten years, she lived with the excruciating belief that she had murdered the man she loved. It was only a decade later, when the scandal broke, that she realized the car was the killer. Her conviction was eventually overturned, but the years of psychological torture could never be refunded. For years, red flags were raised and ignored.

A Wisconsin State Patrol report explicitly linked the ignition switch to airbag non-deployment in a fatal 2006 crash. It was sent to GM and disappeared into the legal department. Indiana University researchers reached the same conclusion; GM lawyers deposed them, settled the lawsuit, and sealed the documents. The company was buying silence case by case, body by body.

Mary Barra was appointed CEO in January 2014, celebrated as the first woman to lead a major global automaker. Within weeks, a dogged engineer working for a plaintiff’s attorney finally pried open the switch and discovered the physical difference between the parts. The recall of 800,000 vehicles quickly ballooned to 30 million worldwide. Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Barra repeated a phrase that became infamous: I cannot tell you why it took years to announce a safety defect.

Barra did what her predecessors never would. She admitted the company was broken. She launched the Speak Up for Safety program, fired fifteen employees including DeGiorgio, and established a compensation fund that paid out nearly $600 million to victims and their families. The company initially tried to limit its liability using a legal strategy rooted in its 2009 bankruptcy.

Following the government-backed restructuring, the company was divided into Old GM and New GM. New GM lawyers argued that the new company was not legally responsible for deaths caused by cars manufactured by Old GM. Under intense political pressure, GM eventually agreed to waive this shield for many victims, but the initial attempt revealed the enduring coldness of the corporate soul. The victims were disproportionately working class and young.

The Cobalt and Ion were budget cars driven by students, waitresses, and young families. The fatality rate from the defects was 20% higher in low-income zip codes. The defect was terrifying because it stole agency. It turned the driver into a passenger in their own death.

In September 2015, the Department of Justice announced a deferred prosecution agreement. GM agreed to pay a $900 million fine and submit to independent monitoring for three years. No individual went to prison. The prosecutor stated that the evidence did not reach the threshold to convict individuals beyond a reasonable doubt due to the diffused nature of the decision-making.

The very GM nod that Sloan had invented to shield the hierarchy. The corporation was punished, but the humans were spared. General Motors is the ultimate survivor. It survived the Great Depression, the mismanagement of the 1980s, the 2009 bankruptcy, and the ignition switch scandal.

But the price was paid by William Durant, who died penniless and forgotten. It was paid by his son Clifford, consumed by the addiction to speed his father sold to the world. It was paid by the workers of the Flint sit-down strike. And it was paid by the 124 known victims, teenagers, nurses, and mothers who died in cars that were known to be defective before they even left the assembly line.

They were the collateral damage of a spreadsheet. The empire survives. Its stock ticker still flashes on Wall Street. The Renaissance Center towers over the Detroit skyline, a gleaming fortress of glass and steel.

Inside, the boardrooms are quiet, and the stock price is watched with religious intensity. The old GM is dead, legally absolved of its sins by the courts. The new GM drives toward a glittering electric future promising a world without accidents. But in the rusted frames of Cobalts in junkyards and in the grief of families who still set a place at the dinner table for someone who never came home, the truth remains.

This is an empire built on a foundation of bones.