Porsche has officially severed its last remaining tie to Bugatti. On Thursday, a consortium led by HOF Capital completed its purchase of Porsche’s minority stake in Bugatti Rimac, ending a chapter that stretches back more than a quarter century to when Volkswagen Group first brought the dormant French marque back to life.
Rimac retains its 55% majority stake in the joint venture. Porsche, which once shepherded Bugatti through the Veyron and Chiron eras as part of the VW empire, now has zero ownership in the brand it helped resurrect.
The departure triggered an immediate leadership change. Christophe Piochon, Bugatti’s chief operating officer whose career at the company dated to the Veyron program, has stepped down. His replacement is Marko Brkljačić, formerly COO of Rimac Technology. The signal is unmistakable: Bugatti’s German engineering bloodline is being replaced by Rimac’s Croatian EV DNA.
Volkswagen Group poured billions into Bugatti over two decades. The 2005 Veyron, with its quad-turbo W16 and 253-mph top speed, was an engineering vanity project that reportedly lost money on every unit sold. The Chiron carried that torch forward. Neither car was ever about profit.
They were about prestige, about proving that VW’s engineering ambitions had no ceiling. That philosophy died the moment VW decided Bugatti’s future belonged elsewhere.
In 2021, Porsche transferred its Bugatti holdings into the newly formed Bugatti Rimac joint venture, with Mate Rimac’s electric hypercar company taking the controlling interest. It was framed as a partnership. It always looked more like a handoff.
Now the handoff is complete. Porsche is out. A group of financial investors holds the minority position. Rimac, a company that made its name building electric hypercars and supplying battery systems to other manufacturers, is firmly in charge of a brand whose identity was forged around the most extreme internal combustion engines ever fitted to a road car.
The Tourbillon, Bugatti’s successor to the Chiron, does retain a combustion engine, a naturally aspirated V16 developed by Cosworth, paired with electric motors. Rimac was careful not to kill the ICE outright. But the power structure behind the badge has changed in ways that matter more than any powertrain swap.
Piochon’s exit is significant. He was one of the last direct links between Bugatti’s Molsheim operations and its VW-era engineering culture. Brkljačić comes from a company that thinks in kilowatt-hours and software platforms, not in turbocharger staging and aerodynamic downforce maps.
Different instincts. Different priorities.
Porsche itself has been tightening its focus. Stuttgart is navigating its own EV transition while managing profitability pressures that make a money-burning hypercar brand a luxury it can no longer justify holding, even as a minority position.
Bugatti will keep building cars in Molsheim. The name on the building stays the same. But the people writing the checks, setting the strategy, and choosing the leadership are now entirely different from the ones who gambled on a thousand-horsepower moonshot two decades ago. Whether Rimac can sustain what VW built, or whether it even wants to, remains the open question hanging over every decision coming out of that factory.
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