Mercedes-Benz: Mercedes Jellinek, the Chrysler Split and a Bribery Ring

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The Mercedes-Benz story began with two rivals: Benz & Cie, founded by Carl Benz in 1883, and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, founded by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1890. In 1900 DMG board member Emil Jellinek, an Austrian diplomat and racer, ordered high-performance cars on the condition that they be named after his 11-year-old daughter, Mercedes. The Mercedes 35 HP dominated motorsport, and by 1902 DMG sold a whole Mercedes line. Weimar hyperinflation pushed the rivals into a 1924 agreement and a 1926 merger as Daimler-Benz AG, with cars badged Mercedes-Benz because Daimler's name was already licensed abroad to firms such as the Daimler Motor Company in Britain. In World War II the company built engines for aircraft, tanks and submarines and barrels for Mauser rifles, supplied the 770 parade car used by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Hirohito, and used more than 60,000 concentration camp prisoners and other forced laborers, links it later admitted.

In 1998 CEO Jürgen Schrempp called the $38 billion merger with Chrysler a marriage made in heaven, but the engineering cultures never meshed. Chrysler lost $1.5 billion in 2006 and announced 13,000 layoffs, and in 2007 Daimler effectively paid a private equity firm $650 million to take it. Between 1998 and 2008, U.S. investigators found, Daimler paid $56 million in bribes across 22 countries to win more than 200 transactions, using over-invoicing, luxury trips and armored cars. It settled for $185 million in 2010 and paid $1.5 billion in 2020 over diesel emissions cheating under the Clean Air Act. The company invested in Turo and Via, helped buy HERE maps for 2.8 billion euros, halted combustion engine development initiatives in 2019, spun off Daimler Truck in 2021, and in 2022 Ola Källenius renamed it Mercedes-Benz Group AG.

• Carl Benz sat on the board of Daimler-Benz until his death in 1929 while its cars carried a rival director's daughter's name.
• Shared products from the Chrysler years included the Chrysler Crossfire on an older Mercedes platform and the Dodge-badged Sprinter van.
• To win favor in Turkmenistan, Daimler paid to publish 10,000 German copies of the dictator's book, Ruhnama.
• The SEC said it was no exaggeration to call bribe paying at Daimler a standard business practice.
• Its EV research included compostable batteries based on graphene and organic cell chemistry with no rare earth metals.