John Elkann
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John Jacob Philip Elkann (born April 1, 1976), often known as “Jaki”, is an Italian industrialist, grandson of the late Gianni Agnelli, and heir to the automaker Fiat, which also owns the Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Ferrari, and Lancia marques. Currently he is vice chairman of Fiat and of the Agnelli Group investment company IFIL, Italy's largest company.
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[edit] Early life
John Elkann was born in New York as the the first son of Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, a painter and a poet and her first husband, Alain Elkann, a French-Italian journalist and writer. His parents divorced in 1981. He has a brother Lapo and a sister, Ginevra, as well as five half siblings from his mother’s second marriage to Serge Graf von der Pahlen.
Elkann spent his childhood traveling to UK, Brazil, and France with his mother and siblings. He attended primary school in New York; then his family then moved to Paris, where he earned a scientific secondary-school diploma at the Victor Duruy Lycée in 1994. In the same year he moved to Italy, to attend the The Polytechnic University of Turin, graduating with a degree in industrial engineering in 2000.
[edit] Career
In 1997 Giovanni Alberto, the son of Gianni Agnelli’s younger brother, Umberto, died of a rare form of cancer at age 33 while he was being groomed by his uncle to head the Fiat Group. Elkann was selected to replace him as heir and in the same year, aged 22, he was appointed to the Fiat board.
While continuing with his engineering degree in Turin, Elkann gained work experience, incognito, in various of the company’s holdings: including a headlight plant in Birmingham, England, and a production line in Kraków, Poland. After graduating he went to New York to join General Electric’s Corporate Audit Staff program.
The deaths of his grandfather Gianni Agnelli and his great-uncle Umberto Agnelli in 2004 propelled Elkann into the vice chairmanship of the Fiat board, under new chairman Luca di Montezemolo, and into the vice chairmanship of the umbrella family holding company Giovanni Agnelli & C. (which controls the Agnelli family's greater than 30 percent stake in Fiat), under Gianluigi Gabetti, chairman of IFIL.
As Elkann is over a quarter of a century younger than Montezemolo, and half a century younger than Gabetti, he is expected to become head of this empire in the future.
[edit] Marriage & Children
On September 4, 2004 Elkan married Lavinia Borromeo on Isola Madre, one of the Borromean Islands of Lake Maggiore; the reception (featuring a 16 foot long chocolate cake depicting dozens of chocolate Cinquecentos and a guest list including Henry Kissinger, Silvio Berlusconi and Elle McPherson) was held on nearby Isola Bella. Their first child, a boy, was born on August 27, 2006.
