He took the company to 33 countries at his peak. These days the automobile business is going more global every day, and in that, as he was about so many things, Ford was prescient. Henry Ford died in his bed at his Fair Lane mansion seven months after I met him, during a blackout caused by a storm in the spring of 1947. He was 83. The fact is, there probably couldn't be a Henry Ford in today's world.
Business is too collegial.
That's not acceptable anymore. But if it hadn't been for Henry Ford's drive to create a mass market for cars, America wouldn't have a middle class today. Lee Iacocca was president of Ford, later chairman of Chrysler, and last year founded EV Global Motors.