Volkswagen is cutting 50,000 jobs, yet their executives just took home €40 million in board compensation. How did the world’s largest automaker get here?

To understand VW’s current €180 billion EV crisis, we have to look back 20 years to a glass factory in Dresden and one man’s absolute obsession: Ferdinand Piëch and the ill-fated VW Phaeton.

In this video essay, we break down the numbers behind Volkswagen’s biggest corporate failures—from the €90,000 sedan nobody wanted, to the billion-dollar Bugatti losses, the 2005 corruption scandals, Dieselgate, and the current electric vehicle meltdown. It’s a story of top-floor corporate arrogance where the executives get bonuses, and the factory workers pay the ultimate price.

If you want to know in detail, take the 26′ video. If you want save time, skip it and go to the sumarization;

Volkswagen: A Culture That Never Learned

The story of Volkswagen’s current crisis — 50,000 job cuts while still generating €6 billion in positive cash flow, with executives collecting €40 million in compensation — is not a new story. It is the same story repeated four times over twenty years.

It begins in Dresden.

In 2002, Ferdinand Piëch decided Volkswagen needed a luxury sedan to compete with the Mercedes S-Class. Not through Audi, which already had the A8. Not through Bentley, which VW also owned. Through Volkswagen itself — the people’s car brand — selling a €90,000 sedan nobody asked for. Engineers spent $1.5 billion developing the Phaeton and built a dedicated glass-walled factory in Dresden just to assemble it. The car was technically brilliant. The badge was wrong. People who could afford it did not want to be seen getting out of something with the same logo as a Golf. In 15 years of production VW built 84,253 Phaetons against a target of 20,000 per year, losing an estimated $38,000 on every one. Total losses exceeded $3 billion.

Anyone who said so publicly was fired.

The Dresden factory then became an EV facility — first the eGolf, then the ID.3. As of 2025 it has stopped building cars entirely. Three products, three failures, one building, twenty years apart.

The pattern is consistent: the Phaeton was leadership arrogance with a VW badge. Dieselgate was leadership arrogance with a defeat device. The Cariad software disaster was leadership arrogance with a laptop. The $180 billion EV bet was leadership arrogance with a battery. Every time the decision came from the top floor in Wolfsburg. Every time customer demand was treated as an afterthought. Every time the workers on the factory floor took the hit.

The executives took an 11% haircut on their €40 million compensation package as a symbolic gesture.

Fifty thousand workers lost their jobs.

The math speaks for itself.