LIKE anyone habituated to the excesses of Wall Street, Tom Wagner and Greg O’Hara knew how to throw a party.
On the night of Nov 9, 2021, guests emerging from the oversize elevator at Zero Bond, the members-only Manhattan social club frequented by Kim Kardashian and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, were greeted with flutes of Champagne. Offerings of sliced raw tuna on crispy rice and roasted maitake mushrooms awaited them as heads turned to admire an Andy Warhol and a Keith Haring, while New Order throbbed in the background. On every cocktail napkin, emblazoned with Hertz’s familiar yellow and black, was “Let’s Go!”—the slogan for its splashy new ad campaign starring seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.
Earlier that day, Hertz Global Holdings, the rental-car giant that careened into bankruptcy during the first two months of Covid-19 burdened with a bad balance sheet and generations of even worse management, had raised US$1.3 billion in an initial public offering (IPO). Somehow, in slightly more than five months, Wagner and O’Hara had pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in corporate history.
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 would run financial analyses that clearly showed the future of rental cars was in electric vehicles (EVs). “We felt we could position Hertz in a completely different way,” Wagner told Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview just before the IPO.
Hertz’s new owners were making a fully charged bet to swap Hertz’s petrol-powered rental-car fleet for EVs. The company announced an unprecedented order for 100,000 Teslas and struck an exclusive deal to supply EVs to Uber drivers. It planned to build out a national, and eventually global, charging network at Hertz’s thousands of locations, with ambitions to become the service manager for the autonomous-driving era.
Wagner was also ski buddies with Brady, then quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and persuaded him to be its new celebrity frontman. Brady, who in his prime joked that he was the slowest man in the NFL, would show, in Hertz’s words, that the company “is making EV rentals fast”—a play on the company’s 1970s commercials, with OJ Simpson vaulting down staircases touting “The superstar in rent-a-car.”