VW Patriarch's Death Puts Spotlight on Billionaire Auto Clan
The divided Porsche-Piech family needs to come to terms with its outsized role at the German auto giant.
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The sudden death of Ferdinand Piech, who built Volkswagen AG into a global powerhouse, puts the spotlight on one of Europe’s wealthiest families and the challenges it faces to navigate the tectonic shifts roiling the auto industry.
Volkswagen was always hard to handle: Its home state of Lower Saxony in Germany owns 20% of the Wolfsburg-based manufacturer and worker representatives can veto factory closures. But the situation got even more complex a decade ago, when the reclusive Porsche-Piech clan — descendants of the VW Beetle’s creator, Ferdinand Porsche — gained control of a majority of the company’s voting shares.