Trickytrick: That's BS!
The true story is that in the mid 1890s through to the early 1900s, Henry Ford started three companies, all of which quickly went bankrupt, before starting the Ford Motor Company, in 1903. Ford's third company, the Henry Ford Co. made decent cars but went bankrupt and was sold to Henry Leland, another Detroit automotive engineer of that era, who wanted to continue making cars, much to the irritation of Henry Ford.
Leland did not or could not use the Ford name, so he fired Henry Ford and changed the name of Ford's bankrupt company to honor the founder of the city of Detroit, in 1701, a neer-do-well French explorer, commissioned by the King of France, by the name of Antoine De La Mothe Cadillac. So, the Henry Ford Company was renamed the Cadillac Motor Car Company, and was run for several years by Henry Leland, who turned Ford's vehicles into luxury vehicles.
Cadillac was purchased by William Crapo Durant, the General Motors chairman, during that era, when GM was acquiring many other car makers. Following the acquisition of Cadillac by GM, Henry Leland left Cadillac to start a new company to make airplane engines for the U.S. Army's Air Force during the World War I years.
Leland named his new company to honor the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who Leland greatly respected and revered. The new Lincoln Motor Company made superb, highly engineered airplane engines. But after the war's end in 1918, production fell dramatically, as the Army was no longer buying large quantities of airplanes. Leland wanted to keep his business going, so he decided to return to making premium automobiles, as he did in his Cadillac years, and began production of the Lincoln automobile, as a worth competitor to crosstown rivals Cadillac and Packard, in the early 1920s. But competition was very fierce in the luxury car market, and Lincoln Motor Company began losing money after several years, and eventually went into it's own bankruptcy.
Henry Ford, who was, by then the world's largest car maker, and one of the world's richest men, saw the Lincoln bankruptcy as an opportunity to get revenge on Henry Leland for stealing the Henry Ford Company away from him, and, in a "what goes around, comes around" scenario, scooped up Lincoln to enter the luxury market. Henry Ford then fired Henry Leland, and Leland's son Wilfred, and installed his own son, Edsel Ford, as the new president of Lincoln.
