the details in a court filing. Jane Welch’s expert valued her
ex-husband’s annual use of a GE-owned Boeing 737 at about
$3.5 million, or nearly $300,000 per month.
T
he essential purpose of a Gulfstream V of one’s own
or unlimited access to a Boeing Business Jet was to
keep a safe distance from the masses—what the writerTom Wolfe described in The Bonfire of the Vanities as a need to
“Insulate, insulate, insulate.”
It may be even truer today, except that the Gulfstream V has
become the G650ER—the speed record holder for the farthest
flight in private-jet history, going from Singapore to Tucson, a
distance of 8,379 nautical miles. And there are other options
for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent than there were in 1999,
when Gulfstream sold 141 planes before the company had any
serious competition. Now Bombardier makes the much-
coveted Global Express jet; Textron’s Cessna division makes
the Citation Longitude, an upgrade from its beloved Citation X;
Boeing still makes a business jet, as do Dassault and Embraer. For
the aspirational class—mere eight-figure millionaires—there’s
been the rise—and acceptance—of fractional jet operators, such
as NetJets, which Forstmann had a hand in starting and is now
owned by Warren Buffett, and the upstart, Wheels Up, which
just raised $128 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion.
A jet often announces a superrich arrival. One of the first
things the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page did
after becoming billionaires—thanks to the IPO of Google in
2004—was to buy a used Boeing 767-200 from Qantas, the
Australian airline, for $15 million—a relative bargain—and
then spend another $10 million refurbishing it with two
staterooms, a shower, a dining area, a lounge, and 15 first-
class seats and the ability to seat 50 passengers. That was only
the beginning. Reportedly since then, Blue City Holdings,
the company they created to own their jet fleet, has bought
another eight jets, including two Gulfstream Vs and another
Boeing, and built a private hangar, at a cost of around $82 mil-
lion, in San Jose, California.
It’s not at all a surprise, given that their owners have reached
the World Series of acquisitiveness, that jets are highly com-
petitive, subject to constant comparisons of size and number.
A few years back, I wrote a profile in this magazine about
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi prince and businessman
who was then worth around $27 billion. He was one of the
largest shareholders in Citigroup, News Corporation, Apple,
and Twitter. He had a lot of toys, among them a Boeing 747
outfitted with a gold throne, and a Hawker Siddley 125. He
told me he was the only private citizen with a Boeing 747 and
the rumors that Brin and Page had one were not true. He said
he knew they had a Boeing 787. (In fact it was the customized
767-200.) He had also just bought an Airbus A380, the only
private citizen to order one of those.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, Shark Tank
regular, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, bought his first pri-
vate jet—a Gulfstream V—on the internet for $40 million. After
his pilot gave the plane a test drive and approved of it, Cuban
wired the money. “I bought it to save time,” he emailed me.
“I’m a believer that time is the most valuable asset we can’t
own. Anything I can do to spend more time with family is a
win.” He has since bought two Boeing jets, one of which he had
specially redesigned to accommodate the Mavericks.
A private plane is alchemical, translating a nine-figure bank
account into actual power (harder than it sometimes looks, for
some people). “For people who are actually not that powerful
except that they have a lot of money, it gives them a calling card
to have power,” one private-equity mogul explains to me. “It’s
all about currency. They get to leave when they want. They get
to arrive when they want, and they get to make their friends be
on their schedule. And then if they are really dicks, they can
leave them when they are late.” Forstmann once did that to a guy
who was 20 minutes late for a flight, after he got stuck in heavy
Manhattan traffic during the annual United Nations General
Assembly meeting. When another passenger on the plane asked
Forstmann to wait, he was told, “Fuck him. I’ve got things to do.”
A private jet forms covalent bonds of the kind that pay off
later—to the acquisitive class, just about the only kind that
matter. A ride in a private jet creates people that owe you some-
thing, debts if only of gratitude. “There’s this whole New York
to Florida trade on the weekends in the winter where it’s like,
‘Hey, you want to ride?’ ” continues the executive. “Because
it’s not like they fly capacity. You use your NetJet and you take
one person, you can curry seven favors. You are like king for the
day.” Who knows the amount of goodwill that Steve Rattner,
the former investment banker and Obama car czar, generated
by giving MSNBC host Joe Scarborough an occasional lift back
and forth to Martha’s Vineyard on the Dassault Falcon 2000 jet
that Rattner pilots himself? Rattner, and his charts, has been a
Morning Joe regular feature for years.O
ne’s jet is one’s castle, where the billionaire makes
the rules. These can get pervy. According to an age
discrimination lawsuit filed (and later settled) by a
male pilot against Mike Jeffries, then the CEO of Abercrombie
& Fitch, there were strict rules, contained in a 47-page manual,
for how the young, male, scantily clad models were supposedAvoiding se curit y is the me aning
of MODERN LUXURY, providing a
bright-line STATUS GRADATION
between private fliers and the merely rich.
VANITY FAIR 97