Porsche tried to buy Volkswagen and ended up owned by it, and Ferdinand Piëch was later forced out of VW

Ferdinand Piëch, born in Vienna in 1937, was a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. The Porsche and Piëch families own the Porsche holding company. Piëch ran Volkswagen from 1993 to 2002 and then chaired its supervisory board. He also held at least 14% of the voting shares in the Porsche holding. From 2005 Porsche, led by Wendelin Wiedeking, bought VW shares. It reached 50.76% in January 2009. By mid-2009 the holding owed more than €10 billion. Wiedeking resigned on 23 July 2009. In August 2009 the two sides agreed to form one group led by VW, and in August 2012 VW took full ownership of the Porsche car business. In September 2010 Piëch moved his Porsche shares into two private foundations in Vienna, with his wife Ursula on the foundation council^†. On 10 April 2015 he said publicly that he was distancing himself from VW chief executive Martin Winterkorn. On 25 April 2015 he resigned all his VW posts. In 2017 he sold most of his ordinary shares in the Porsche holding to members of the two families and left its board^†. He collapsed at dinner with Ursula and died on 25 August 2019, aged 82. He had 13 children with four women. In 2026 the holding's 153,125,000 voting shares are held only by members of the Porsche and Piëch families, and it owns 53.3% of VW's voting shares and 25% plus one share of Porsche AG.