How Hertz’s Bet on Teslas Went Horribly Sideways

By the time Wagner’s hedge fund, Knighthead Capital Management, and O’Hara’s private equity firm, Certares Management, bought Hertz in a June 2021 bankruptcy auction, the company had slashed its debt and cut 15,000 jobs. Neither Wagner nor O’Hara had any experience in the industry, but to the self-styled disrupters in an archaic business, that was a virtue. They’d run financial analyses that clearly showed the future of rental cars was in electric vehicles. “We felt we could position Hertz in a completely different way,” Wagner told Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview just before the IPO.