[orwin]

Under Goshn and his close early advisors, Renault-Nissan started working on EVs, launching the Leaf and Zoé. Early, he also managed to streamline production of the two companies, and started to implement management changes that let some workers have more autonomy.

The issue is that power got to his head and truly believe he was the second coming of Jesus or something, and stopped improving his companies to rub shoulders with the Nepo CEO/aristocrat crowd. Had he continued the push toward affordable EV, Nissan could have been BYD, but R&D stopped, for no visible reason.

My personal theory is that the fallout from his divorce estranged him from his early friends and his closest advisor (his wife) and idiotic sycophants made him believe he was above the law and deserved even more. I've heard a lot of good things about pre-2008 Goshn, from people who aren't usually glazing billionaires, so maybe I'm biased.

[csours]

> My personal theory is that the fallout from his divorce ...

Yes, I've noticed that people having nasty public fights with family members can lead to extremely negative effects on decision making.

[jillesvangurp]

He's definitely narcissistic. But that doesn't make him wrong. It suited the Japanese board very well to paint him as corrupt and get rid of him. Nissan's performance after that took a decidedly downward trajectory. Which is why the merger with Honda became a kind of hail-Mary strategy recently.

There was an interesting interview with him where he commented on the, then, still active negotiations about a possible merge of Nissan and Honda.

Very interesting to listen to. He identified that there was essentially no synergy between the two and that a merger doesn't really make sense for either company. They don't really complement each other. After the merger, you'd merely have two of each in a gigantic company that isn't performing great. Similar cars, going after similar buyer segments, competing EV strategies and related investments, etc. Except Honda is a bit better than Nissan. So, they'd be ending up inheriting a lot of problems whereas Nissan wouldn't really gain anything they don't already have.

The core issue is that Nissan in particular needs to adjust course and is not willing to do that. That's also the reason this deal is collapsing: Honda doesn't want to make Nissan their problem and Nissan is rejecting the notion that they need to change.

Ghosn's analysis was pretty sharp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljewn28Korw

[Jgrubb]

> He's definitely narcissistic. But that doesn't make him wrong.

If you’re right about narcissism, one of the issues there is an inability to realize that he can be wrong. “Maybe I’m wrong about this” literally cannot occur to the narcissist, their entire worldview is built around their being right and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong (and therefore an enemy).

[rr808]

BYD is unique because it can leverage the Chinese government's push into EVs along with the lax environmental regulation giving cheap batteries & other components. I dont think anyone can compete with Chinese car makers.

[adrian_b]

I believe that this thesis supported by many Americans, that the Chinese companies are too strong competitors for the US companies only due to governmental subsidies and lax environmental regulation is an extremely dangerous illusion.

Until maybe 10 years ago, I would have agreed that all or at least most of the Chinese products were no better than copies of Western products.

However during recent years, at least during the last 5 or 6 years, both among commercial products and among the published research papers, I have seen far more innovation from China than from USA.

Such underestimation of the capabilities of a competitor, like the assumption that without subsidies or lax regulations they would not still be better, can only doom USA.

While these claims about subsidies and lax regulations are ubiquitous in USA for justifying failures, I have yet to see any proof or any accurate numeric data supporting them.

I doubt that China really has laxer environmental regulations than USA. What is likely to happen is that in China it must be much easier to avoid the enforcing of the regulations, by bribing the authorities.

Perhaps there are governmental subsidies in China, but in USA I never see the start of any significant private investment without great subsidies, at least from the local government, in the form of various kinds of tax breaks.

This kind of governmental subsidies that are very common in USA are only seldom permitted in other countries, e.g. in Europe.

[myrmidon]

> this thesis supported by many Americans, that the Chinese companies are too strong competitors for the US companies only due to governmental subsidies and lax environmental regulation is an extremely dangerous illusion. [...] I have seen far more innovation from China than from USA.

I full agree on this.

But what people also often miss is that wage levels are not even close to comparable. Chinese manufacturing pays an average of <$25k (purchasing parity adjusted, ~15k otherwise!!) for a 49h week.

It is absolutely expected that the US is not competitive in labor intensive industries, simply because Americans are rich. Trying to "fix" this with tariffs and relaxed regulations (to lure heavy industry/manufacturing back) is an expensive experiment doomed to fail, and taxpayers and consumers are gonna pay the price.

If you campaign with "we're gonna bring back tons of jobs that pay $5/hour, but don't worry, taxpayers/consumers are gonna pick up the difference", suddenly the whole thing does not sound that good any more.

[ethbr1]

3-9x equivalent US / European subsidies is a big difference. https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/foul-play-on-the-scale-...

And subsidies don't only affect the final price of a good: they also provide a company more funding for R&D. To say nothing of forced technology transfers via joint ventures.

The EU also still subsidizes a ton of industries, e.g. agriculture at €40.95 billion https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/common-agricultural-policy/... (I'd agree that subsidies are needed to support a key sector like agriculture today, but they're still subsidies)

[bildung]

EU car manufacturers are also heavily subsidized. Subsidies are really hard do compare because you can structure them very differently and still achieve similar results (think direct loans or land leases, lower taxes, state sponsored infrastructure like rail, electricity, water, large state-sponsored orders, research grants, workforce education, consumer grants for EV vehicles, lower taxes for EV vehicles etc.).

Here's an article stating VW got over €9b over 8 years, for example: https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/dax-subventionen-gel...

If that is true, BYD actually gets about the same as VW.

[spacebanana7]

Hyundai and Kia still manage to make fairly competitive EVs. Having an established dealer, customer and maintenance networks can mitigate those BYD advantages.

Also if Japan had a serious contender fr the EV space, a good CEO should be able to persuade their government subsidies are deserved. With a trifecta of corporate, union and environmentalist lobbying.

[kridsdale1]

Boy, that final paragraph sure looks like another automaker CEO…

[dredds]

His pay sounds small in retrospect and hardly compares to what Elon extracts from Tesla, but still deemed high by Japan's standards where employee's jobs are considered sacrosanct in a more just system. Ultimately that was why he was hired in the first place, and Nissan needed such a outsider at a critical moment to reform themselves but didn't learn from it unfortunately.

Asianometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsL6JAUZFiQ

[namdnay]

No he was clearly always an asshole (but I agree he clearly had some genius)

[sfifs]

> and idiotic sycophants made him believe he was above the law and deserved even more

Well in all fairness he is above the law. He walked out of Japan and is free in his country.

[vosper]

> He walked out of Japan

Even better: He escaped by hiding in a music equipment box that was carried onto a private jet

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57760993

[chasil]

There are two well-known documentaries about the Goshn captivity and escape from Japan.

The first is from Netflix:

https://www.netflix.com/title/81227167

The second is from Apple:

https://tv.apple.com/us/show/wanted-the-escape-of-carlos-gho...

Carlos Goshn participated in the Apple documentary.

IMDB is also showing this one:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt15048602/

[WeylandYutani]

There was a famous Dutch philosopher who managed to piss of the government and escaped from a castle that way (minus the private jet) in the 17th century. His wife was allowed to bring him books and he used the box to escape. He went to Paris and never got extradited either.

[lmm]

His prosecution was blatantly motivated (the CEO who replaced him has far bigger embezzleme^H^Hfinancial irregularities that no-one cares to charge him for). I doubt people would have been so eager to help him escape if he had actually broken the law rather than being charged for running a big company while foreign.

[mikeyouse]

He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of. The men who were “so eager” to help him escape were paid upwards of $1M to do so… man I’m getting tired of people justifying ludicrous amounts of graft and theft.

If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean. And there are plenty of big companies ran by people who aren’t so morally bankrupt.

[gottorf]

> If other people embezzle as well, send them to prison, but there’s no universe in which Ghosn is clean.

Well, selective justice is a form of injustice. I only have superficial knowledge of the Ghosn saga, but if what the GP alleges is true, then it's not fair to Ghosn that he's prosecuted for something that others get a pass. Of course, I take your point that it's entirely possible to be a bigcorp CEO without fraud and self-dealing.

To scale it down, lots of people drive over the speed limit, which is against the law; but only some people get pulled over and ticketed for it. Many people also observe the speed limit. In the Ghosn analogy, suppose that Japanese drivers got a pass, but foreigners didn't.

Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit? Do we want to live in such a world? Is it just a matter of scale, the difference between driving a car too fast vs. stealing millions of dollars from your employer?

[rtpg]

There are plenty of criciticisms about the means by which he was prosecuted but "others get a pass but he doesn't" is not a great way of thinking about this.

If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.

Of course the way he was thrown around, when they could have impounded a bunch of his assets and just restricted his movements... the police have their ways of doing things and restriction of speech in particular to avoid coverups is probably a huge chunk of their motivations.

Ghosn isn't the first executive in Japan to ever be arrested. But maybe the police felt the stakes were too high. During the Livedoor scandal, Horie had to post a 300 million yen bond for his temporary freedom, and that was for an "internet company". How much would Ghosn's bond need to be in comparison? Not saying that this is the right way to go about things, but it feels at least consistent.

[lmm]

> If the government decides to get more serious about this stuff, there will be firsts! There will be people who "got away with it"! It's never applied perfectly evenly. You gotta start somewhere.

Sure. But if that "somewhere" just happens to be the literal 1 foreigner among literally hundreds of CEOs doing the same thing, there will naturally be raised eyebrows.

[mikeyouse]

> Should everyone get pulled over the instant they exceed the speed limit?

In places with speed cameras, that is exactly what happens. There’s no better way to find an unjust law than to enforce it evenly.

And scale is very important! In your analogy, many CEOs are speeding, some driving 5mph over, some 10mph, but Carlos was tripling the speed limit and then sawed through the bars of the courthouse before he saw trial. It’s insane to me that people are defending it. If you don’t want to be selectively prosecuted for massively embezzling company funds - don’t embezzle company funds..

He had secretly bought himself a 140ft yacht with stolen company funds!

https://img.20mn.fr/FofgQudYQhKtDOGwCHCuRyk/1444x920_un-cust...

[ty6853]

I don't care if he raped 12 nuns, he was unable to get a fair trial so his escape was just. Japan's justice system is a farcical.

[lmm]

> He had enriched himself to the tune of tens of millions of company dollars completely undisclosed to the firm.. he had multiple mansions, yachts, and “CEO Reserve” bank accounts that the BoD wasn’t aware of.

Really? Why did none of that come through in the court case then? I don't like the norm of giving CEOs valuable benefits instead of cash, but it's undeniably an accepted norm, especially in Japan.

He was convicted for the deferred pension compensation that he had not yet actually received, and for one year, despite the fact pattern being the same every year. The court blatantly made the minimum possible conviction because they knew none of the charges had merit but couldn't possibly acquit him.

[mikeyouse]

The SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...

The French have multiple arrest warrants for him due to multiple overlapping fraud and embezzlement cases: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230704-second-french...

The BVI found that tens of millions of dollars stored there and the luxury yacht bought with Nissan’s funds and registered to a Shell company owned by Ghosn’s son, actually did belong to Nissan.. and on and on.

Why does anyone give that absolute creep the benefit of the doubt? It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!

[lmm]

> The SEC found that he had over $140M in undisclosed compensation, much of it hidden from Nissan’s management: https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2019/comp246...

That looks to be one side's claims, and even this one-sided telling acknowledges that he never received any of that money, and that the CFO and finance department signed off on what happened.

> It didn't come out in the court case because he fled the country before he was tried!

He fled the country after being detained and isolated (especially from his wife) for literally years without actually being charged or getting to trial. They were blatantly trying to break him without having to go to the trouble of actually proving a case. And the trial I'm talking about, that convicted him on exactly one count, was held in his absence after he escaped and had no reason to not throw everything at him.

If and when he's convicted in a fair trial under international norms where he gets a fair chance to defend himself, I'll condemn him for that. But until then I'm not going to take the allegations of the people who wanted him gone at face value.

[BonoboIO]

As much as i think, that he would never have gotten a fair trial … he did not even pay his escape helpers.