Chrysler: Riches to Rags

I saw the story yesterday about Chrysler being bought by private equity firm Cerberus for $7.4 billion dollars. It just seems profoundly sad to me that this once great American car company went at a rummage sale price. I mean it was almost exactly nine years ago that Chrysler was worth $38 billion in stock in their merger with Daimler-Benz.

It seems ironic that start-up companies with a few employees like YouTube get snapped up for $1.6 billion, and Chrysler, a giant company that affects the livelihood of thousands of families and has been around since 1925, goes for less than five times as much. Times change I guess, and so do fortunes. Wikipedia already has the news update. That would have taken over a year with the old World Book Encyclopedia, but that’s another story.