Jeff Bezos Says Companies Don't Last '100+ Years.' This 1 Beat the Odds (But Maybe Not for Long)

Beating the odds, building an iconic company, and then what happens. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

“If you look at large companies,” Jeff Bezos told Amazon employees in 2018, “their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not 100-plus years.”

Let’s talk about a company that beat those odds—even though it recently marked an unfortunate milestone, after 102 years in business.

The company is Hertz, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. Hertz has been straining (WSJ, $) under the weight of $19 billion in debt, to say nothing of an idled fleet of 700,000 cars, and we’ll get to the recent story of how it got in this position below.

But still: 102 years and counting. And, to quote Monty Python, it’s not (quite) dead yet.

So let’s do a brief history lesson, and then come back to the present. There are two names to know when we talk about the Hertz origin story:

• Walter Jacobs, who was 22 when he launched the original (and very likely first) rental car company in the United States: “Rent-a-Car” of Chicago, in 1918 and—

• John D. Hertz, who bought out Jacobs in 1923, but kept him on…