In mid-July 1955, at Daimler-Benz’s annual meeting in Stuttgart, two new major shareholders registered and were elected to the carmaker’s supervisory board: Herbert Quandt and Friedrich Flick. Herbert registered a sizable 3.85 percent stake in Daimler, which he and Harald had inherited from Günther. But Flick took everyone by surprise by filing a 25 percent interest, a blocking minority. The mogul, fresh out of prison, had secretly started buying shares in Daimler. The Quandt siblings and Flick now wanted more. Herbert and Harald desired a 25 percent interest. Flick was eyeing majority control. As two of Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties went head to head to increase their stakes, Daimler’s share price rose feverishly. In January 1956, a third investor emerged: a speculating timber merchant from Bremen who had amassed an 8 percent stake. He wanted to sell his share package to one of the two parties at a massive premium: double the stock price.
United by the presence of a common enemy, the Quandts and Flick now called a truce. They made a secret deal to squeeze out the new investor. Flick rejected the speculator’s offer, which forced the latter to sell the stake to Herbert and Harald at a much lower price. The Quandt siblings and Flick then split the share package and continued to increase their stakes. At Daimler’s next annual general meeting in June 1956, Harald Quandt and Flick’s elder son Otto-Ernst joined the supervisory board of the Stuttgart carmaker.
By late 1959, Flick was Daimler-Benz’s largest shareholder, with about a 40 percent stake. The Quandts held some 15 percent. Between them stood Deutsche Bank, with a 28.5 percent interest. The triumvirate of Hermann Josef Abs — Deutsche Bank’s chairman and Daimler-Benz’s supervisory board chairman — the Flicks, and the Quandts would rule over Europe’s largest carmaker for the next decades. And it was hardly a contentious reign. Flick placed part of his Daimler stake in a holding firm owned by Herbert Quandt, which allowed Herbert to qualify for a tax break. The dynasties were now officially in cahoots.
But whereas Herbert and Flick wound up closely collaborating at Daimler, in an attempt to rescue BMW they found themselves on opposing sides. The Munich carmaker was on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1950s, due to a lack of variety in car models and bad management. Herbert asked Harald’s permission to buy BMW shares on his own account, separate from the Quandt group. It was a risky investment, but Herbert, who loved fast cars, wanted a shot at restructuring the firm.
Herbert began buying BMW shares and convertible bonds. The press first suspected that Flick was behind the rising share price, but he denied it. However, at BMW’s annual meeting in December 1959, a Flick-backed restructuring plan was proposed. It included issuing new shares exclusively to Daimler-Benz, which then would have held a majority stake in its competitor. Flick, as Daimler’s largest shareholder, saw it as a cheap way of bringing BMW under his control. But the restructuring plan that Flick supported ultimately was not accepted at the shareholders’ meeting in Munich, which was quite heated. Following Flick’s attempted corporate coup, Herbert firmly took the reins and began to reorganize BMW himself, after becoming its largest shareholder.
Herbert’s decade-long restructuring of BMW proved successful. He installed new management, expanded the range of car models, and continued buying shares. In 1968, BMW hit one billion deutsch marks in revenue, and Herbert held 40 percent of its stock. That summer, he sold the family’s longtime stake in the oil and gas giant Wintershall to the chemicals behemoth BASF for about 125 million deutsch marks. He used part of the proceeds to become BMW’s controlling shareholder. To this day, two of his children still retain that level of control over the carmaker, making them Germany’s wealthiest siblings.