What happened to the Kaiser company that built Liberty ships in WWII?

[SmackFu]

I was watching this documentary on the History Channel yesterday about the Liberty merchant ships that were built during WWII. It was mainly focused on Henry Kaiser, whose company built many of the ships and also was one of the Six Companies that built the Hoover Dam. It sounded like he had a pretty massive business going on during the war.

As a sidenote, they mentioned that the part of the company created to provide health plans to the workers had ended up as Kaiser-Permanente. So I have the obvious follow-up question: what happened to the rest of the company? Kaiser Shipyards were huge and had many locations around the country in 1945, but the company seems to have vanished. Probably bought up or something, but I can’t find anything. Anyone know?

[Mr.Green_Fool]

…Is this the same Kaiser as in Kaiser Aluminum which has an active factory in Spokane WA?

[Babar714]

No, no. They make Kaiser Blades now. Some folks call it a ‘sling blade’- I call it a Kaiser blade.

[GIGObuster]

Kaiser Industries was founded by Henry J. Kaiser, which also owned Kaiser Aluminium, Kaiser Steel, Kaiser Electronics, Kaiser Magnesium, Kaiser-Frazer Automotive and Permanente Cement.

This Permanente Cement company had a health plan that later became Kaiser Permamente.

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/foshen.html

In the 1940s Henry J. Kaiser was a household name, as familiar then as Lee Iacocca and Donald Trump are now. Like a Horatio Alger hero, Kaiser rose from lower-middle-class origins to become an enormously wealthy entrepreneur, building roads, bridges, dams, and housing. He established giant businesses in cement, aluminum, chemicals, steel, health care, and tourism. During World War II, his companies built cargo planes and Liberty ships. After the war, he manufactured the Kaiser-Frazer automobiles. Along the way, he also became a major force in the development of the western United States, including Hawaii.

Yes, one of those cars was the Jeep.

http://www.jailhurwitz.com/media/kaiser_done/24_media.htm

…

So vast is his shadow that writer Stephan A. Gilford said that in the
1950s, you could drive a Kaiser-built Willys Jeep on freeways built with
Kaiser cement, protected by guardrails made of Kaiser aluminum, across the
Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge, whose great piers were built by Kaiser.
You could then retire to your home, built with Kaiser wallboard and heated
by natural gas or oil carried by Kaiser-built pipelines.

…

When Kaiser died in his sleep in 1967 at age 85, his legacy included 190
plants with 90,000 employees. Within 20 years, most of his holdings,
including the Spokane plants, were sold. Without the giant, the giant
organization he built was never the same.

Indeed, last February Kaiser aluminum declared bankruptcy:
http://www.azom.com/details.asp?ArticleID=1265
“Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.”
-Henry J Kaiser, industrialist

[ralph124c]

Henry J. Kaiser came out of WWII with a vast fortune, from building ships. His immediate priority with the end of the war, was how to utilize the output of his steel and aluminum mills, and he thought he had the solution with automobiles. Even in 1949, entering the automobile business was next to impossible-Kaiser invested $100 million, and lost most of it (Kaiser Motors went bust around 1956). From all accounts, they were pretty decent cars-but he just wasn’t big enough to compete with GM and FORD.
A word of warning to would-be atomobile entrepreneurs: if you are thinking of getting into this business-forget it!
I suspect that the losses from the car venture was enough to seriously hurt the rest of the Kaiser empire.