The General Motors Corporation (GM) acquired the Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware


Thursday 2nd May 1918

The General Motors Corporation (GM) acquired the Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware. The deal was effectively a merger engineered by William Durant. The original founder of GM, Durant had been forced out of the company by stockholders who had disapproved of Durant’s increasingly reckless expansionist policies a few years earlier. Durant started Chevrolet with Swiss racer Louis Chevrolet and managed to make the company a successful competitor in the economy car market in a relatively short period of time. Still the owner of a considerable portion of GM stock, Durant began to purchase more stock in GM as his profits from Chevrolet allowed. In a final move to regain control of the company he founded, Durant offered GM stockholders five shares of Chevrolet stock for every one share of GM stock. Though GM stock prices were exorbitantly high, the market interest in Chevrolet made the five-for-one trade irresistible to GM shareholders. With the sale, Durant regained control of GM.


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