Cars and Drivers

GM Board Makes Grave Error, Names Whitacre CEO

Ed Whitacre, who is at least partially responsible for the problems at GM since it came out of Chapter 11, will add the CEO title to that of chairman. He has been interim CEO since pushing Fritz Henderson out of the…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published January 25, 2010, 10:04am ET · 1 min read

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Ed Whitacre, who is at least partially responsible for the problems at GM since it came out of Chapter 11, will add the CEO title to that of chairman. He has been interim CEO since pushing Fritz Henderson out of the job seven weeks ago. Whitacre made a big show about his plan to recruit a world-class executive to run the GM. Instead, it appears that Whitacre has effectively appointed himself to the position without an objection from the full board

Whitacre has been GM chairman since July, so he carries some of the blame for whatever he perceives was wrong with Henderson’s time at the helm.

Whitacre says that GM will be profitable this year. If so, it is primarily because of Henderson. Whitacre also says GM will pay back the $6 billion it still owes the Treasury by mid-year. Once again, most of the work to set up the No.1 US car company to be able to do this was engineered by Henderson.

Whitacre will take the credit for GM’s turnaround, but Henderson will have done most of the work.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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