DETROIT — In recent years, despite many challenges to his leadership of General Motors, Rick Wagoner had managed to keep a firm grip on his job.
During his tenure as chief executive, beginning in 2000, the company's stock has fallen from $80 a share to less than $4 now, and its market share has fallen roughly 10 percentage points. There have been many challenges to his authority, most notably from billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian in 2006 and from angry members of Congress during hearings last fall. Throughout the attacks, he had managed to retain the unwavering support of his board.
For a time, Wagoner appeared he might become the rare chief executive who gets another chance, this time to try to fix many of the problems that occurred on his watch.
But Wagoner appears to have met his match in President Obama, whose calls for sacrifices from all sides apparently included a call for Wagoner to step down. On Sunday, Wagoner agreed to the suggestion by the Obama administration that he resign and let somebody else steer General Motors Corp.
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During his nine-year tenure, Wagoner never appeared to waver from his determination that GM would reclaim its spot as the unrivaled leader of the auto industry, despite steadily falling sales. Wagoner joined GM's financial operations in 1977 out of Harvard Business School, and, like generations of executives before him, worked nowhere else during his career.
Through three major restructuring plans enacted on his watch — eliminating dozens of plants and tens of thousands of jobs, and jettisoning hundreds of dealers — Wagoner maintained a stolid confidence in himself and the company's strength. Only recently did he acknowledge the need to significantly pare the company's brand and model lineup, to better match the company's bloated infrastructure with the shrinking market.
Only at the second round of congressional hearings last fall did Wagoner started acknowledging that the company had made mistakes, and that its problems were not all attributable to outside forces like the weakening economy.
Wagoner presided over some of the biggest losses in GM history. In 2002, the company had predicted that it would earn $10 a share by the middle of the decade.
Instead, GM lost $30.9 billion in 2008, when its per-share loss translated to more than $50 a share. GM stock, an economic bellwether that sold above $70 only three years ago, closed Friday at $3.62.
