While everyone panicked, Certares bought Hertz for $6B.

They sold 300,000 cars into a 45% price spike.

Generated $2 billion in unexpected cash.

Here's the most perfectly timed bet ever: This wasn't just another pandemic casualty.

Hertz carried $19 billion in debt when COVID hit.

Revenue collapsed 73% in Q2 2020 as airports emptied.

But underneath the crisis lay something PE firms recognized immediately...

In 2013, Michael Dell bet his entire fortune on a dying company:

Stock had crashed from $42 to $10.

One wrong move meant losing everything.

Here's the $67 billion gamble that saved his empire: A $24.4 billion buyout.

A struggling PC company.

5 years later: a $70+ billion enterprise leader.

This is the story of the greatest private equity turnaround in tech history:

GM hired a CEO who'd never sold a single car.

Ed Whitacre from AT&T had 9 months to save America's biggest automaker.

His first decision broke every rule in Detroit.

Here's how a telecom CEO saved GM: First, let me set the scene.

2008 wasn't just a bad year for GM.

It was an existential crisis decades in the making.

While Toyota perfected lean manufacturing, GM was drowning in bureaucracy.

While Honda built reliable cars, GM was building... excuses.

A BANKRUPT airline became one of the industry’s profit leaders.

Delta Air Lines went from $6.1B LOSS to $5.9B PROFIT.

Not through discounts or flashy marketing...

But with a 5-step blueprint that raised them from the ashes: 🧵 In 2005, Delta Air Lines filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

No wonder: They hadn't posted a profitable quarter since 2000.

And yes, 9/11 hurt the entire industry...

But Delta had deeper problems: