Walter Chrysler made Durant repeat his salary offer out loud
In 1916 Walter Chrysler told General Motors founder William Durant he was quitting Buick. Durant rushed to Flint by train and offered $10,000 a month plus a $500,000 bonus each year, with complete control of the division. Stunned, Chrysler asked him to say it again. When Durant did, the former railroad mechanic said yes on the spot.
Chrysler grew up in Ellis, Kansas, the son of a locomotive engineer, and started as an apprentice machinist in the local railroad shops, earning a mechanical qualification by correspondence course. Restless and quick-tempered, he drifted across the West as a roundhouse mechanic, known for his skill at setting valves, and climbed from foreman to general master mechanic. His railway career peaked as works manager at the American Locomotive Company's shops near Pittsburgh.
In 1911 an Alco director, banker James Storrow, asked whether he had thought about making cars. Chrysler had been an auto enthusiast for years, and Storrow introduced him to Buick president Charles Nash. Chrysler quit railroading for good to run Buick's production in Flint, Michigan, for $6,000 a year, and quickly cut costs, for example by no longer finishing hidden undercarriages as lavishly as the visible bodywork.
He left Buick in 1919 after clashing with Durant's plans for GM, who paid him $10 million for his shares and made him one of the richest men in America. Bankers then hired him to rescue Willys-Overland for a staggering $1 million a year. After failing to wrest control from John Willys, he took over the struggling Maxwell Motor Company and folded it into the new Chrysler Corporation in 1925.
Expansion came fast. He added the Plymouth and DeSoto brands, bought Dodge Brothers in 1928, and that same year financed the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, finished in 1930. Time made him its Man of the Year for 1928. After his wife Della, whom he met at school, died in 1938, he suffered a stroke and never fully recovered, dying in 1940.
Source: Walter Chrysler
