CEO em Fuga: A História de Carlos Ghosn

When I was in business school, the man was a legend.

This documentary portrays a man being credited for making Renault and Nissan literal dozens of billions, in cash. We're talking financial results here, not equity market valuation.

Then we see how power corrupts the man. When going back to France to head Renault, lying about giving up the reins of Nissan, and holding on to them instead. How he lived on a plane between the two HQs. How he surrounded himself with yes men. How his hair grew, his glasses disappeared, his Sarkozy style shoes made him taller, his suits got nicer, his wife got dumped, his own image PR went on overdrive, how he lost touch with his mission, his people, and reality. The unnecessarily long segment on the galerie des glaces in Versailles was so absurd, it's hard to feel sorry for the guy.

If you've read a biography of a dictator, you've read them all. Humans aren't wired to have that much power. There's a fair amount of Putin in his image propaganda, a lot of Stalin in his entourage of yes men.

As pretty much always, follow the money. He made the companies billions in cash in the bank. Because France and because Japan, his compensation remained hidden for many years. Then people had a wtf moment when they found out, to which ghosn replied "ford CEO makes 4x". So using a complex and hidden structure of companies, he bought real estate in holiday destinations, and embezzled funds. If Renault entities buy jewelry and houses in Rio I'd bet my money on embezzlement.

The Japanese are portrayed as joyful idiots until one morning the whole system conspires to throw him in jail without due process. Apparently the absence of due process in Japan is called due process.

I wish there had been more quantitative and analytical work done. Pie charts, graphs. Cash created over his tenure, cash he got, cash he allegedly embezzled. Because ultimately this documentary is story telling, often times in a strange format, with lots of valuable interviews, but virtually no analysis or research.

This is about greed, I wish it had been quantified more.

Missing from this documentary is, after all the interviews with the grieving family and employees: is Carlos Ghosn guilty or not? The family, a few ex employees, and some of the journalists, focus on their view of the harshness of Japanese legal system. But they never really say that Ghosn was innocent of the charges. My takeaway is that he definitely did something wrong and that ego and greed got the better of him.

The producers threw in a few token interviews with Nissan and Japanese government officials but if I did not know better, I'd say this Netflix piece was funded by the "Carlos Ghosn got a raw deal" foundation.

It is a good documentary that introduces new parts of Carlos Ghosn's life we didn't know about.

A genuis Lebanese who made his way up to two of the most successful automotive companies in the world.

However, it lacked lots and lots of facts and details that would make the story more thrilling.

So many unanswered questions and missing parts of the puzzle. I think the writers and producers should have digged deeper and maybe made it as a small series instead of documentary and provided the viewers with additonal information on many incidents mentioned lightly in the documentary such as the renauld employees sacking.

But overall, it is nice to watch.

As "Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn" (2022 release; 95 min) opens, the CEO of Renault and Nissan is fleeing Japan for his home country of Lebanon in 2019. We then go back to 1996, with Renault is serious financial trouble, and its then CEO picking Ghosn (pronounced "Gone") to come in and clean things up. In 1999, Renault buys a controlling stake in Nissan, another car manufacturer in financial dire straits, and Ghosn is dispatched to become Nissan's CEO... At this point we are 15 min into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this is only the second feature-length documentary of director Lucy Blakstad, whom I had not heard of before. Here Blakstad brings us a 2-in-1: in the first hour, we witness the meteoric rise of Ghosn, resurrecting both Renault and Nissan by ruthlessly cutting costs and jobs where needed, and earning him the nickname the "Cost Killer" but later also "Mr. Fix-It" for turning around the financial fortunes of both companies. In the last half hour we witness the fall, when Ghosn is arrested by Japanese police in 2018 for (alleged) financial improprieties, just ahead of a planned full-blown merger between Renault and Nissan. We learn along the way that, once arrested, the conviction rate in Japanese courts is 99%. That doesn't sound normal to me. Did Ghosn commit financial crimes? I have no idea. This documentary feels a little rushed, to be honest. A lot of material is covered in just an hour and a half, and I wished that the film makers had gone a little deeper. The big mystery is how a once well-respected CEO comes crashing down for alleged financial crimes. This documentary doesn't explain it.

"Fury: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn" recently started streaming on Netflix, which recommended it to me based on my viewing habits. The documentary isn't bad but it feels like a missed opportunity, focusing on Ghosn's rise and then his improbable escape from Japan, but skipping a lot of details why he was arrested in the first place. Of course don't take my word for it, so I'd suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Fugitive: The Curious Case of Carlos Ghosn" is an investigative feature-length documentary directed by Lucy Blakstad in 2022. It follows the rise and fall of Carlos Ghosn, a businessman in the car industry straddling 2 cultures. The film tracks the rise of Ghosn, a General Manager at French car manufacturer Renault in the late 90's as he takes control of Nissan in Japan and begins to take a firm grip over both companies. But when his business practices came into question, he was jailed in Japan while the scrutiny of his business practices raged in his absence. Whilst on parole, he and his associates plot to get him out of Japan, and intrigue ensues.

This film is an interesting deep dive into one of the more intriguing cases in modern times of a business leader who, once the golden child, had a phenomenal fall from grace. While online pundits applaud and worship and applaud Elon Musk and other car industry leaders as untouchable bastions of commercial enterprise, this film paints a more realistic picture of the life of a corporate leader who flew a little too close to the sun.

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