John D. Hertz: Patron of Taxis and Buses

Although John D. Hertz established what is now known as the Hertz Car Rental, a company with annual revenues exceeding $8 billion, his great success in business began with another company sporting a yellow motif. Hertz founded yellow taxi cabs and built it into one of the largest franchise operations in the world with prosaic yellow cabs--a color he selected after consulting experts at the University of Chicago--running through the streets of nearly every American city. He also established cab and truck manufacturing operations which he subsequently sold to General Motors. The proceeds of the sales of these companies made him one of the wealthiest men in America. He used his wealth in partnership with Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers and mega financier Floyd Odlum to acquire other companies including RKO. And as many of the wealthy tycoons of the 20th century, Hertz dabbled in horse racing, with one of his thoroughbreds, Count Fleet, winning the Triple Crown. B.C. Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, called the Hertz story "one of the most inspiring and most illuminating romances of modern American business." [1,753-word Titans of Fortune article].