This past fall, my wife and kids met Elon Musk at a technology fair. They were there showing off their Girl Scout troop’s TARC team rockets, and Musk was wandering around was being Musk. My wife managed to wrangle a tour of SpaceX out of him for the troop, which of course I volunteered to tag along on. That was a pretty generous offer from Musk, and that got me thinking about his role as head of Tesla, and the efforts that his car company seems to be taking to revamp not just the automobile but also how it is fueled and sold. That’s a big deal and I think Elon Musk deserves kudos for what he has achieved with Tesla to date.

Not every head of an automotive company is quite as visionary and impactful. If you consider just Musk’s contemporaries, people like Henrik Fisker of Fisker and Phil Murtaugh of Coda, then you know that running a car company is often a roll of the dice. The question for today is, who has, in your opinion, been the individual who has lost the most on such a roll?

Consider Henry Ford for a moment. This was the man who put America behind the wheel. He also was an individual who disdained traditional engineering approaches, demanding to be shown why something would not work, and in his later years was wildly anti semitic and a burden on his namesake business. But was he the worst car company leader history has ever seen? I’d wager no, but you now have the opportunity to weigh in on who you might think was the worst.

Image source: EvoMag