car brands are confusing Chrysler owns Dodge Fiat owns Maserati and BMW owns Rolls-Royce Volkswagen owns Porsche Porsche owns Volkswagen wait what yes you heard that right Porsche is a subsidiary of Volkswagen which is itself a subsidiary of Porsche and as you might expect the legal quirks and corporate Health structures that got us here were both a nightmare for my Riders and will be a lot of fun for you so let's explain how these companies got so impossibly entangled the first thing you need to understand is that both companies have some particularly Sinister skeletons in their closets Volkswagen was first established in 1937 in Berlin which is a combination of date and location that goes together like peanut butter and Hitler now this is pretty relevant because from its Inception Volkswagen was a government project Hitler wanted every family in Germany to be able to afford one extremely ugly car so he bankrolled the manufacturing of this thing 300 000 Germans paid the government for one and then Hitler got distracted by Jews existing and no one got a card some people shot some other people the name of the German government changed a few times and eventually Volkswagen ownership was transferred to the West German government in 1945. still a government project but with fewer Nazis eventually in 1960 Germany decided to sell Volkswagen it would become a private company whose shares could be bought and traded by anyone but much like any helicopter parent that puts their child up for sale on the free market the German government wanted to make sure that Volkswagen was in good hands so when they denationalized the company they also passed a law called the Volkswagen act what this law said is that votes in Volkswagen shareholder meetings would require an 80 consensus that meant that another company couldn't just buy up 51 of Volkswagen and completely control the company someone would need 80 to take full control and it just so happened that the German government was going to keep 20. 2 percent of Volkswagen shares when they sold it now that bizarrely specific law will become relevant later but for now let's talk about Porsche remember this Volkswagen Beetle from like 45 seconds ago well that car was designed by this guy Ferdinand Porsche but Porsche aspire to do greater things than getting rich off of Nazi war profiteering he wanted to get rich off of good old-fashioned capitalism so after doing a quick stint in a French prison for crimes against humanity Porsche was ready to launch his own brand which he called Porsche A sly reference to the fact that his name was Porsche the first car he produced under his shiny new brand was this thing the 356 but inside it wasn't all that shiny because the 356 was just a bunch of reused parts from the Beetle and Porsche would Outsource almost all of their manufacturing to Volkswagen so now it's the 1960s and you have two completely separate German car companies that are economically dependent on one another because this one old Nazi plagiarized himself and all of a sudden anyone can buy shares of Volkswagen support things ah geez we sure would like more control for this company that we totally rely on let's start buying shares so they started buying shares and they kept buying shares and at one point they were buying so many shares that they accidentally made Volkswagen the most valuable company in the world for like a few hours one day in October of 2008 but that's actually not relevant at all because money is imaginary and it just went back to normal the next day ultimately their plan was to eventually own 75 percent of Volkswagen with a Volkswagen act in place this wouldn't put them in total control Volkswagen because they would need 80 of a government still owned 20.
2 percent but it would give them access to Volkswagen's cash flow and they desperately needed Volkswagen's cash because they were about 10 billion euros in debt from buying so much of Volkswagen basically they were going to buy Volkswagen to pay off the debt that they went into by buying Volkswagen business but here's the problem they never got to 75 they only managed to buy up 50. 76 percent of Volkswagen so they had to pay off their debt some other way but how could one single mom and pop company pay off so much debt you might be asking and to that I would say I have no idea but fortunately Porsche isn't just one company it's actually two companies and to that you might say this sounds complicated I don't really have time for this and to that I would say just shut up and listen there's Porsche AG the actual business that manufactures cars and then there's Porsche SE the holding company who doesn't really do anything other than own Porsche AG it's sort of like how my writers do all the work but I exist to maintain the cages from which they toil now if you can wrap your mind around this what Porsche se decided to do to pay off their debt was to sell Porsche AG the actual car manufacturing company to none other than Volkswagen now while all this was going on the EU was like wait a minute this Volkswagen Law is super illegal no more Volkswagen Law that meant that the 80 rule no longer applied so Porsche SE which on the majority of Volkswagen shares was now also the controlling shareholder of Volkswagen but Volkswagen still owned Porsche AG from when Porsche needed to pay off their debt so that's the structure of this corporate nightmare cake Porsche owns Volkswagen and Volkswagen owns Porsche is buying a company to pay off the debt from buying the company a good use of money I'm not qualified to say but I am qualified to say that syncing your paycheck into getting takeout all the time isn't and look I understand that it's tempting schlepping outside into a heat wave to stand in line next to a bunch of sweaty people at the grocery store is a bad time but those aren't your only options because now there's factor factor is the best way to get affordable healthy ready to eat meals that fit whatever your lifestyle is they take the tough stuff out of meal prep with registered dietitians who work hand in hand with chefs to deliver fully prepared nutritious meals made from scratch right to your doorstep it's cheaper and healthier than takeout and it's faster and a lot less wasteful than grocery shopping and Factor makes it so easy to be conscious about what you're eating and what you want to be eating whether you want your diet to be vegetarian Gourmet low calorie keto whatever Factor can make it happen I've been a genuine customer factor for months now and I still eat Factor almost every week just the other day I had to Peruvian shrimple which was delicious and all I had to do was heat eat and enjoy if you want to cut down on your food costs while being more conscious about what you eat I can't recommend Factor enough so what are you waiting for head to factory75.
