Two years after the stock ownership deal, the company sold General Motors a complicated security that effectively gave it a 26 percent stake in Avis. Apart from that, Avis’s employee ownership experiment lasted nine years, until 1996, when Avis sold itself to a company called HFS. Employees got an average of $26,000 each. Eighty or 90 current and former Avis executives got an average of $1.75 million each.

A year later, in 1997, HFS took Avis public. (The initial public offering raised just over $330 million. The banker Bear Stearns charged $15 million for its services.) In 1999, Avis bought PHH. Remember PHH? That was the company Avis sold its fleet leasing operation to in 1987. PHH was owned by Cendant, a company that had been formed in 1997 by the merger of HFS — right, the company that had spun off Avis in 1997 — and another company called CUC. HFS had retained 19 percent of the company’s stock when it took Avis public. With the stock portion of Avis’s purchase price for PHH, Cendant now owned 34 percent of Avis.

A couple of years later, Cendant bought the roughly two-thirds of Avis that it didn’t already own and made Avis a wholly owned subsidiary.

In 2006, Cendant split itself into four independent companies, one of which was the Avis Budget Group. (Somewhere along the line, Cendant had also acquired Budget Rent a Car.) The Avis Budget Group became the parent company of Avis Budget Car Rental.

Modern capitalism has two parts: there’s business, and there’s finance. Business is renting you a car at the airport. Finance is something else. More and more of the news labeled “business” these days is actually about finance, and much of it is mystifying. Even if you can understand — just barely — how it works, you still wonder what the point is and why people who do it need to get paid so much. And you strongly suspect that the swirl of financial activity around Avis for the past six decades has had little or nothing to do with the business of renting cars.