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Somewhere over the Atlantic right now, a private jet is flying completely empty. No passengers, no cargo — just a crew doing their job and an aircraft burning fuel to get somewhere it needs to be. It happens thousands of times every day across the global charter market. And occasionally, those seats are yours to...
The tail number on Michael Jordan’s private jet isn’t random. N236MJ breaks down exactly as you’d expect from the most decorated player in NBA history: 23 for his jersey number, 6 for his championship rings, MJ for his initials. That registration has been Jordan’s personal stamp across two aircraft spanning nearly two decades, and in...
Travis Scott’s private jet was once a Las Vegas casino plane. Before it wore the Cactus Jack Airlines livery and the tail number N713TS, the Embraer Lineage 1000 that carries the Houston rapper across the world belonged to MGM Mirage, ferrying high-rollers between resort properties. Scott acquired it in December 2020, at the peak of...
When a reporter from Inside Edition cornered Kenneth Copeland at a private airport in 2019 and asked why he couldn’t fly commercial like everyone else, the televangelist’s face shifted from composed to something closer to rage. He leaned in, voice rising: “You didn’t ask that question — don’t even bring that up again.” It was...
LeBron James is worth over $1 billion. He is the first active NBA player to reach that milestone. He earns tens of millions a year from his Nike lifetime deal alone, holds stakes in Liverpool FC, the Boston Red Sox, and the Pittsburgh Penguins, and runs one of sport’s most successful business empires. He does...
Most billionaires buy a private jet and move on. Larry Ellison bought a Gulfstream, sued a city for the right to land it after dark, staged mock dogfights over the Pacific in a retired Italian Air Force trainer, and tried to import a decommissioned MiG-29 fighter jet from Russia. The US government stopped him on...
The tail numbers are the first clue. N887WM commemorates August 1987, the month Bill Gates met Melinda French at a Microsoft dinner in New York. N194WM marks January 1994, the month they married in Hawaii. Both registrations are held by MENTE LLC, a Gates-controlled entity in Washington State, and both aircraft are Gulfstream G650ERs worth...
When Mark Zuckerberg’s brand-new Gulfstream G700 lifted off from Monterey, California on its maiden flight in December 2024, it burned 5,500 kilograms of fuel and deposited 19 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere before touching down at his 1,500-acre estate on Kauai. It was a fitting debut for an aircraft that costs roughly $80 million...
When Jeff Bezos touched down in Venice for his 2025 wedding to Lauren Sánchez, he didn’t arrive alone. Around 90 private jets descended on northern Italy that weekend, ferrying tech royalty, celebrities, and world leaders to what became the most photographed private aviation event in recent memory. That spectacle, more than any single aircraft, captures...
In 2020, a 19-year-old college student named Jack Sweeney built a Twitter bot that tracked Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available flight data and posted its location in real time. Musk noticed. He sent Sweeney a direct message offering $5,000 to take the account down, citing security concerns. Sweeney countered with $50,000, or a...