the summer of 1999, soon after Teddy Forstmann, the late
billionaire pioneer of leveraged buyouts, completed the sale of
Gulfstream, the private-jet manufacturer, to General Dynam-
ics, Gulfstream’s board of directors asked him what he wanted
as a gift for successfully engineering the company’s turnaround
and sale. It turned out to be the very moment private jets went
from being merely an exclusive form of fast transportation to
a form of rarefied and much-coveted currency.
Forstmann Little, Forstmann’s private-equity firm, had
bought Gulfstream for about $850 million from the Chrysler
Corporation in 1990. When he opened the box, Forstmann
found a bloated, poorly run business. He was pissed. But rath-
er than sit back and watch the company descend into seem-
ingly inevitable bankruptcy, Forstmann eventually took over
as CEO, reversed Gulfstream’s fortunes, engineered an initial
public offering in 1996, and then sold the company for $5.3 bil-
lion. In nine years, he had delivered to investors a $5 billion
profit on an original equity investment of about $200 million.
The deal became legendary on Wall Street. “I’m an artist and
Gulfstream was a big canvas,” Forstmann once told me in an
interview about a decade ago.
Robert Strauss, the ultimate Washington insider and Akin
Gump partner, was chairman of the Gulfstream board, which
Forstmann had stacked with his friends, a variety of luminaries
and powerful former government officials such as Henry Kiss-
inger, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George Shultz, Roger
Penske, Michael Ovitz, and Lynn Forester.
“What do you want?” Strauss asked Forstmann. “We’ve got
to give you something? What about some options?”
“I own so much stock,” the canny Forstmann replied. “I
don’t want to have options.”
Forstmann thought about Strauss’s request and called him
back. “I know what I want,” Forstmann told him. “I want a G
Five,” referring to the company’s then-state-of-the-art private jet.
“Holy shit,” Strauss replied, stunned at the audacity of
Forstmann’s request.
“Think about it,” Forstmann said to him. “It’s forty million
bucks. You were going to give me more than $40 million worth
of stock anyway.”
Strauss conceded that point to Forstmann and then dis-
cussed the novel request with the Gulfstream board. Needless
to say, Forstmann got his own personal Gulfstream V.O
ne of the revelations of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal
was the degree to which the private jet has become the
definitive, highly overdetermined artifact of modern
super money culture. Epstein’s plane (even if it was an older
secondhand model) certified his wealth, earned him chits with
academics and former presidents, served as a stage where he
could perform his grift, and of course helped him groom his
prey in his sick sex scheme.
Private air travel dazzles everyone, and once you fly this
way, you’re hooked. Former presidents like to ride on private
jets: Bill Clinton, of course, who’s famously, problematically
addicted to private jets, but also Barack Obama. Donald Trump
has placed a model of one of the two yet-to-be-configured
Air Force Ones smack-dab in the middle of the Oval Office.
Harvard scientists, Nobel Prize winners, narcissistic defense
attorneys love to fly private too. Setting foot on the tarmac
confers an irresistible, intoxicating feeling of specialness.
Avoiding security is the very definition of modern luxury,
marking a bright line between private-jet owners and their
lucky guests, and the merely rich. Even first-class commer-
cial fliers, with their little glasses of Champagne, their special
blankets, are schmucks, fenced off in pens, forced to take off
their shoes like everyone else.
Private jets have become the essential element of mod-
ern superrich business and pleasure infrastructure, woven
in deeply, the communal living space for the most acquisi-
tive, rapacious people in the world. Can you imagine how
inconvenient it would be for the global elite to talk about
climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, or
at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, or at the
Aspen Institute in Colorado, or at the Bilderberg Meetings—
this year in Montreux, Switzerland—without traveling there
on their private jets?
A personal, commercial-size private jet was not yet the
coin of the rich-guy realm when Forstmann made his bold
request—Hugh Hefner made a big show of having a plane, an
airborne Playboy Mansion, and of course there was Air Force
One, since 1962, the definitive superpower ride. Jackie Ken-
nedy’s robin’s-egg-blue paint job was the ur-customization,
beginning to show what was possible when you had power
over your own plane. But during the ’90s, the trend definitely
began to build. Business titans got addicted. Jack Welch, the
legendary CEO of GE who turned the company into the most
valuable and most admired in the world, also put a premium
on having unlimited, free access to a private jet after he retired
in 2001—he had gotten used to traveling privately as a GE
executive. Thanks to an “employment and post-retirement
consulting agreement” with GE that Welch signed in Decem-
ber 1996, he would have “access to GE aircraft for unlimited
personal use and business travel,” among other perquisites.
The precise details of Welch’s delicious post-retirement
contract were not fully known from GE’s public filings.
But in 2002, in the middle of his acrimonious divorce from
Jane Beasley Welch, his second wife of 13 years, she revealedI
n
96 DECEMBER 2019
PAGE 94: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OFFLEXJET L.L.C. PAGE95: PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN/TRUNK ARCHIVE