#120 Billy Durant (Creator of General Motors)

It's fitting that Durant's name as GM's founder is cast in bronze on a historical marker in front of the corporation's headquarters. Because neither GM nor its most famous American brands would likely exist today had he not either created or save them. That marker is about the only public reminder at General Motors of the man who created GM. the largest industrial corporation in the history of the world. William Durant is no longer exactly a household name.

He's seldom mentioned in the same breath with Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, or Alfred P. Sloan. Yet of all the colorful men who propelled the United States into the automobile age, Billy Durant was perhaps the most unusual. And from an organizational standpoint in the pioneering era, the most important. Durant had a hand in shaping the beginnings of three of the four major American automobile manufacturing corporations that exist today. Of the major US auto manufacturers that survive, only Ford was not significantly influenced by Durant.

Unlike most of the Pioneer automotive giants, Durant was not a back shop tinkerer. While other men put automobiles together. He put organizations together. And he did it with dramatic flair. He was an extremely complex and paradoxical personality.

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