Whelp, guess you shouldn't have spent years abandoning the legacy of Henry Ford. While I'm certainly glad they've let go of his overt racism, they abandoned the positive parts of his legacy too.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

-Henry Ford

Henry Ford would have never done a stock buyback. He designed and improved the Model T to be as cheap as possible. He designed it to be as repairable as possible. He built in clever features like a power takeoff so that farmers could power attachments with their car. He fostered a diverse ecosystem of third party manufacturers that would make accessories and modifications to Model Ts. He didn't try to sue them or do whatever the 1920s equivalent of locking things behind DRM would be.

Today, if it lives anywhere, the legacy of Henry Ford lives on in China. American car manufacturers have completely abandoned the vision of creating an affordable vehicle for the common man. Instead, the companies have been completely infested by the MBA class, who realize you can get a higher rate of return by making fewer numbers of extremely expensive cars. Ford invented the assembly line specifically so he could make a car that the average person could afford.

Henry Ford was a common man born on a small farm, son of an Irish immigrant. Today, Ford Motor Company is lead by CEO Jim Farley, who previously was CEO of McDonalds and Harley-Davidson. His bio from his Wikipedia page:

Farley was born to a banker father in Buenos Aires, Argentina,[1] where he spent his early years, before moving to Greenwich, Connecticut. Before university, Farley attended Portsmouth Abbey School, a Catholic, college preparatory school in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.[citation needed] He graduated from Georgetown University and then later, the UCLA Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.[2][1]

Farley's grandfather worked at Henry Ford's River Rouge Plant in 1918.[2] He is a cousin of the entertainers Chris Farley, Kevin Farley, and John Farley. He is also a cousin of Carolina Hurricanes TV analyst and former NHL and AHL player Tripp Tracy.

Ford Motor Company was founded by a man who came from nothing. Currently it's lead by a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth. China is recent enough to industrialization that most of its car companies are still led by their original founders, most of whom came from very humble beginnings. I can't help but think this has a profound impact on how they see the world and the types of cars they seek to build.

If the American car companies really want to compete, they should adopt a new rule. No executive should have been born to a family making more than 90% of the median household income or have attended an Ivy League school. And they must have an engineering degree and no MBA.