A man with a net worth of $2.8 billion is now due to spend ten months on full-time menial community work, picking up the rubbish jobs in homes for the elderly, drug addicts or others whose demons and difficulties have consumed their lives.
You would think that John Elkann, the 49-year-old scion of the Fiat and Ferrari multi-industry family business, would be wholly unsuited. He agreed to this community service and a $215 million fine, paid jointly with his two siblings, to avoid their tax case going to court. Elkann’s request for probation does not entail any admission of responsibility, nor does the settlement reached with the tax authorities.
Elkann looks like something of a learned professor, a cross between Jeremy Hunt and Tom Hiddleston, albeit with impeccable Italian grooming. Elkann’s serious focus has also transformed the fortunes of the failing family business he inherited, which now includes not only noted brands such as Fiat and Ferrari, but the Dutch medical equipment maker Philips and the news magazine the Economist. Today it is a $40 billion global empire, the value of whose holdings has grown 2,700 per cent since he took over on the death of his legendary grandfather Gianni Agnelli in 2003. Elkann saved not only Fiat, but large swathes of the Italian economy. You would think that Elkann would not need to get his driving glove-soft hands dirty.
Yet Elkann does indeed have a lifetime of transferable skills.
Wrangling difficult parents? It is reported that he hasn’t been in a room with his mother, Margherita, since the funeral of his grandmother in 2019. In fact his community service is the latest twist in a legal battle between Elkann (supported by his two younger siblings) and his mother. It has been going for nearly two decades, in a case so protracted and seemingly vicious that they have long since cut off contact. It is as labyrinthine in complexity as it is simple emotionally: love and its worth.
Drugs? Elkann’s errant younger brother Lapo Elkann created a sensation when, early on an October Monday morning in 2005, a fiftysomething transgender prostitute called Patrizia put in a call to the ambulance services from her home in Turin’s red light district. She was screaming in Italian, “Fast! Fast! At my house there is an important person that’s feeling bad!”
The paramedics found the 28-year-old Lapo naked and unconscious from a near-lethal dose of cocaine. He was in a coma for three days. John Elkann was the first to visit the hospital, leaving without comment, which is his publicity-phobic style in a family of flamboyants. Lapo later compared this incident to a psychological “car accident”, saying to the New York Times in 2007: “I was very lucky not to die in that crash.”
When Lapo awoke he was front-page news, including in the major Italian newspapers the family owned. The grandson of Agnelli, often referred to as “the unofficial king of Italy”, could not have been more humiliated.
According to an interview Margherita gave to Vanity Fair in 2008, this overdose came three days after she called Lapo on his birthday on October 7. She said Lapo replied, “I cannot talk to you until you make peace.” Margherita said this made her feel “very, very sick. And he probably even more sick.”
In some ways it is astonishing that such a Croesus-rich dynasty is unable to settle its differences with more privacy and dignity. Yet it also makes total sense. If the Agnelli saga suggests one thing, it is that money does not buy family harmony — quite the opposite.
The family of Gianni Agnelli — one of the 20th century’s most glamorous tycoons — are sometimes compared to the Kennedy clan in the US or the British royal family yet they can make the travails of both look grey and suburban, the series Succession a cosy sitcom. In the Agnelli story is suicide, untimely death and kidnapping. As any visitor to Italy knows, and as Shakespeare understood, family rows are louder and more dramatic there. This is a Netflix family saga as sung to opera.
To understand it you have to see John Elkann as the eye of the storm, the one still point around which a cast list of “characters” revolves. Even his name is pointedly sober: he was christened in honour of his famous grandfather Gianni Agnelli and became his anointed heir. Yet his parents chose “John”, the Anglicised and boring version of “Gianni”. This compared to a family of fabulous names, such as Gianni’s wife and John’s grandmother, Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto.
Marella was in a circle of young female and glamorous aristocrats of the 1960s that Truman Capote named “the Swans”. Capote called Marella “European Swan Numero Uno”. She was portrayed by Isabella Rossellini in the 2006 film about Capote, Infamous.
Capote ultimately betrayed the swans’ trust by writing about their secrets, and they cut off contact. Until then, Marella said, “instead of a shrink, I had Truman”. She wrote in her memoir, Marella Agnelli, The Last Swan, “he was waiting like a falcon”.
Marella would need the toughness she acquired during this period. Her husband Gianni Agnelli had —in a family pattern — inherited the family business from his grandfather at a young age. Gianni’s father, Edoardo, was decapitated by the propeller of his seaplane when Gianni was only 14. His mother was killed ten years later in a car accident in 1945: she was hit head-on by an oncoming United States army truck near Rome.
After a grim war in which Gianni was wounded fighting in tanks on the Eastern Front, there was no funding limit to Gianni’s playboy antics, which became part of Fiat’s cool branding. He jumped off helicopters for swims in Antibes, partied with Jackie Kennedy and had relationships with stars such as Anita Ekberg and Rita Hayworth. He drove both cars and his La Dolce Vita lifestyle very fast. He was close with John F. Kennedy, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, who later gave his young grandson Lapo a job as his personal assistant.
Yet the family’s wealth and status were not equal to its warmth. Marella once told a biographer, “For Gianni, a woman is to be conquered, not to be loved.” They had two children, Edoardo and Margherita. Margherita characterised Gianni as a chilly father. In her interview to Vanity Fair in 2008 she said she and her brother struggled for his attention. One example: Edoardo was a young boy when his father promised to pick him up in his helicopter and fly him to watch the family’s soccer team, Juventus, play. The helicopter never came.
Edoardo, the firstborn and only son, was not considered by Gianni to be capable of taking over. He rebelled. He studied Eastern philosophy at Princeton, travelled in India and the Middle East, eventually converted to Islam and changed his name to Hisham Aziz. Even more audacious: he became an anti-capitalist. “Part of my family has been taken over by a baroque and decadent logic,” Edoardo told the left-wing daily Il Manifesto.
One night in 2000, Edoardo put a brown blazer over his pyjamas and drove his Fiat to a viaduct outside Turin known as the “Bridge of Suicides”. At his funeral, Gianni Agnelli was reported by La Repubblica to be leaning on Lapo, “almost nailed to the arm of the child”.
Gianni Agnelli decided his legacy would be passed on to John, with business roles for Lapo — his two eldest and beloved grandsons by his daughter Margherita. (The third sibling, John and Lapo’s sister Ginevra, became a film-maker). When John was just 21 he was appointed to the board. Fiat was in dire straits and no one imagined this kid could rescue it.
The patriarch Agnelli died in January 2003, leaving a debt-ridden financial mess. Marella appeared at his funeral flanked by John and Lapo. In accordance with her late husband’s wishes, Marella began the process of transferring her stock in the family firm to John, strengthening his position as leader.
In 2004, Margherita reached a settlement, selling her stake in the business. But by 2007 she filed the first of several lawsuits against her father’s close business advisers, essentially disputing the 2004 settlement. Her three oldest children have also filed suits.
Her detractors say she regretted selling out because in 2004 Fiat looked like a dead duck, and she had no idea how miraculously her son could transform the business. Her allies argue her case on multiple counts. Her two primary allegations, simplified, were that there were parts to the value of the business that she claimed were kept hidden from her, and that the money coming from her mother Marella should have been taxed under Italian rather than Swiss rules.
John Elkann subsequently released a statement saying, “I am very hurt as a son and surprised by this private matter, which was resolved in 2004 with everyone’s consent and agreement.”
Margherita, who divorced from John’s father and had five more children in a second marriage, is not poor. In Vanity Fair in 2008 it was reported that her company had more than $700 million in funds. She has founded an orphanage next to her late brother’s home in Turin, and dedicated it to Edoardo. Edoardo, she said, saw children’s “defenceless innocence being injured and found it unacceptable”.
Yet in the Agnelli family, wealth is used as something of a weapon. John grew up visiting his paternal grandmother Carla Barba Navaretti. She survived a kidnapping as she got out of her car in Turin in 1975: she was kept chained to the wall for 35 days and had her hair cut off. But her hostage-keepers gave her champagne and cake on Christmas Day, according to the New York Times report at the time. The ransom was reported at $975,000, but it was unclear whether the Agnelli or Elkann family had paid it.
In an apparent dark echo of this, it was reported that Lapo, her grandson, in 2016 rang his family from New York to demand $10,000 “to guarantee his safety”, a United States official told the Associated Press. Investigators said Lapo was found safe and later concluded that the story was probably concocted after he ran out of money during a drink and drugs binge. Prosecutors decided to drop all charges against Lapo. It was reported by Reuters that Lapo said the allegations were “fake news”. Lapo added he had been through a difficult period: “I’m clear in my determination to continue to work on myself.”
John told the In Good Company podcast in 2024 that his childhood made him resilient and responsible. He felt he had to step up to look after his younger siblings while his parents divorced and they were repeatedly moving countries.
While he performs his penitential community service, indirectly as a result of his mother’s efforts, John will have time to reflect. In May last year John claimed in an interview to the Italian Avvenire newspaper that his mother had acted “in the worst way”, and the result was her children were living with “great pain, which has distant roots”.
Last week Paolo Siniscalchi, counsel for the Elkann siblings, said the hope was that the new offer of both money and menial work — floor scrubbing or whatever form it takes — can end the traumatic legal disputes, “bringing this painful matter to a swift and definitive close, avoiding further personal and family repercussions”.
How much money is one prepared to sacrifice for love? How much love is one prepared to sacrifice for money? Or in other words: who is holding whom hostage?
Helen Rumbelow is a London-based writer
