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Avis Budget Group was spun out of the Cendant conglomerate in 2006 and grew into one of the big three U.S. car rental companies, with a 26 percent market share by 2021 behind Hertz and Enterprise. From Parsippany, New Jersey, it runs about 600,000 vehicles at 10,000 locations with roughly 25,000 employees. It reunited the brands by buying Avis Europe in 2011, added Apex Car Rentals in New Zealand in 2012 and Italy’s Maggiore Group in 2015, and also runs Payless. In 2013 it paid $500 million for car-sharing pioneer Zipcar, a hedge against app-based mobility.

In 2018 the company was among more than 90 Fortune 500 firms with an effective federal tax rate of zero or less, using depreciation deductions and carry-forwards under the 2017 tax law. When COVID-19 hit, rental companies sold off fleets, then demand surged during a semiconductor shortage and rates soared. In November 2021, a short squeeze driven by retail traders made Avis Budget a meme stock, and its shares doubled in a day. By 2025 the hangover arrived: $11.652 billion in revenue, a net loss of $995 million, an operating loss of $1.32 billion and total equity of negative $3.1 billion.

• Avis serves corporate travelers, Budget serves families and Payless targets deep-discount renters, all under one parent.
• Zipcar rented cars by the hour from city street corners, unlocked with a smartphone app.
• Retail traders on forums like Reddit bought heavily shorted shares, forcing hedge funds to buy back at rising prices.
• The used car bubble burst as supply chains normalized, cutting the resale value of the fleet.
• Rising interest rates raised the cost of the debt used to finance hundreds of thousands of rental cars.