Executive Chair Bill Ford, who really runs Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) (and not CEO Jim Farley), made $17,302,266 in 2022. He is the primary architect of Ford’s poor performance last year. Ford’s board, which sets his compensation, has robbed shareholders again based on the compensation numbers. (These are the biggest electric vehicle business failures in American history.)

Ford’s share price began 2022 at about $20. It currently trades for a little more than $12. Farley managed almost to halve the price of the stock.

The year was full of fumbles. Ford underestimated the cost of parts by $1 billion in the third quarter. How can a major global manufacturer make such a huge mistake?

Ford’s F-150 Lightning was mispriced. The company had to raise prices four times, from a base price of $40,000 to $60,000. To be fair, some of those increases were this year.

Ford’s quality problems, which Farley has acknowledged, continue. For example, the Lincoln and Ford brands did poorly in the important J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Customer Service Index (CSI) Study.

Get Our Free Investment Newsletter

I have read, and agree to the Terms of Use

Ford missed its 2022 full-year financial guidance. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out:

Ford Motor Co. posted disappointing quarterly results Thursday, leading the U.S. auto maker to miss its full-year profit guidance for 2022, as supply-chain snags, quality problems and structural inefficiencies continued to drag on earnings. Chief Executive Jim Farley said on a call with analysts, “We left about $2 billion of profit on the table due to cost, and especially, to continued supply-chain issues.”

The list of failures at Ford last year is longer than those mentioned here. Ford laid off several thousand employees in 2022. Bill Ford was not one of them. Instead, he keeps his position among the richest people in the world.