Maurice Taylor Jr. (born August 28, 1944) is the President and
chief executive officer
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization.
CEOs find roles in variou ...
of
Titan International, a tire and wheel manufacturing company. Taylor, nicknamed "the Grizz" for his bear-like gruffness, started in
tool and die manufacturing before purchasing Titan Wheel International from
Firestone.
Taylor was born in
Detroit
Detroit ( , ) is the List of municipalities in Michigan, most populous city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is situated on the bank of the Detroit River across from Windsor, Ontario. It had a population of 639,111 at the 2020 United State ...
,
Michigan
Michigan ( ) is a peninsular U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest, Upper Midwestern United States. It shares water and land boundaries with Minnesota to the northwest, Wisconsin to the west, ...
, and raised in
Ellsworth, Michigan. He gained brief fame outside the business world when he made
an unsuccessful run for the
Republican nomination in the
U.S. presidential election of 1996, a campaign chronicled in his book ''Kill all the lawyers – and other ways to fix the government''. He spent over $6 million, but received about 1% of the vote in all the primaries in which he ran. His campaign is featured prominently in the
Michael Lewis
Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) Gale Biography In Context. is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to '' Vanity Fair'' since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. ...
book ''
Trail Fever''. Taylor was also one of the subjects on the 19th episode of
PRI's ''
This American Life
''This American Life'' is a weekly hour-long American radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. It is broadcast on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is ...
'' entitled "Rich Guys", originally aired in 1996.
In February 2013, Taylor met harsh criticism in France after a letter he wrote to the French minister of industrial renewal,
Arnaud Montebourg. In that letter, he declined to invest in a Goodyear-owned French tire factory because he claimed the workers were unproductive, and insulting the French in general. He added that he would be better off hiring workers in China or India and "pay less than one Euro per hour wage". In response, Montebourg noted that the French tire producer
Michelin
Michelin ( , ), in full ("General Company of the Michelin Enterprises P.L.S."), is a French multinational tyre manufacturing company based in Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes '' région'' of France. It is the second largest t ...
is vastly larger and more profitable than Titan. In February 2015, in an interview with French television about the closed Goodyear factory, Taylor said that "France is a ruined country".
References
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External links
*
Presidential Campaign video clips
1944 births
Living people
Candidates in the 1996 United States presidential election
20th-century American businesspeople
{{US-business-bio-1940s-stub