Who Owns Ford?

Ford has no controlling owner, but the Ford family controls it. Ford Motor Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the family holds Class B shares carrying about 40% of the voting power on a far smaller share of the economics. The UK register holds a curiosity: a Ford company incorporated in 1925 that has run through six names and now has no name at all — it is called by its own company number. Ownership verified 6 September 2026.

Who owns Ford today?

Ford Motor Company is a public company registered in Delaware. Its shareholders own it, and the largest are the index managers — Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street.

The British company is FORD MOTOR COMPANY LIMITED (00235446), incorporated 7 December 1928, the year Ford began building the Dagenham plant.

Ultimate parent and corporate structure

Its person with significant control is Ford Technologies Limited (04850367), and the entry uses an unusual qualifier: ownership of shares, voting rights and the right to appoint directors, in each case as a member of a firm.

That phrase is a distinct PSC condition. It records control held through a partnership rather than as a direct shareholder — a structure most readers will never have met, and one that only appears on the register when a firm rather than a company sits in the chain.

Above the UK companies sits Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, which has no parent.

Major shareholders or controlling persons

Ford has two classes of stock. Common shares carry one vote each and are held by the public. Class B shares are held by the Ford family and carry weighted voting rights amounting to about 40% of the total vote — a proportion fixed in the company’s constitution rather than one that drifts with the share count.

The family’s economic stake is a small fraction of that. So Ford belongs with Alphabet, Meta and Roblox as a company where the founding family’s control rests on a share class rather than on the size of its investment — and unlike Tesla, where Musk’s influence rests on holding a fifth of the ordinary shares.

Bill Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford, is executive chair. The arrangement has survived since the 1956 flotation and has repeatedly deterred takeover interest.

Official records and evidence

Ford’s US filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission are the authoritative record of the share classes and the family’s holdings — the annual proxy statement sets out the Class B arrangement explicitly.

Companies House establishes the UK structure and nothing about who controls Ford. It does, however, hold one of the stranger entries on the whole register.

Company 00208760, incorporated 2 October 1925 and registered at Ford’s Dunton campus in Essex, is a private unlimited company currently named “00208760 UNLIMITED”. Its previous names run:

• DAGENHAM MOTORS LIMITED — 1925 to 31 December 1981
• FORD PROPERTY COMPANY LIMITED — to 14 February 1986
• FORD FLEET FINANCING LIMITED — to 6 March 1998
• FORD MOTOR COMPANY EXPORTS LIMITED — to 6 April 2001
• LR CAPITAL LIMITED — to 28 May 2008
• LR CAPITAL — to 30 July 2008

Six names, then none. A company can be renamed to its own registration number, and this one was — which is worth knowing before concluding that a numbered company on the register is a dormant shell.

The fifth name is the interesting one. LR is Land Rover. Ford owned Land Rover from 2000, and the company carried that name through exactly that period, reverting to a number in July 2008 — weeks after Ford completed the sale of Jaguar Land Rover to Tata, as this site’s Land Rover page records.

Ownership history and changes

Henry Ford founded the company in 1903 and it stayed wholly private until 1956, when it floated — with the Class B structure built in from the start to keep the family’s control intact.

Ford has never been acquired and, alone among the large American carmakers, did not take a government bailout in 2008, having mortgaged its assets — including the blue oval itself — to raise cash beforehand.

Its ownership story is one of disposals: Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata in 2008, Volvo Cars to Geely in 2010, Aston Martin sold in 2007, and Mazda reduced to a small holding. The Premier Automotive Group Ford assembled in the 1990s was dismantled entirely.

Related companies and brands

Ford owns the Ford and Lincoln brands and its financing arm, Ford Credit.

It no longer owns Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo, Aston Martin or Mazda — each covered separately on this site, and each now under a different owner. Ford is one of the clearest cases where the honest answer to “what does this company own” is mostly a list of what it used to.