Warren Buffett Just Stepped Down at 96. The Company He Bought for $725 Million Now Flies More Aircraft Than Southwest Airlines.

Berkshire Hathaway’s private jet business operates more airframes than the world’s fifth largest airline fleet, and it is still buying roughly a hundred jets a year.

Warren Buffett became Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman emeritus on September 18, 2026, at the age of 96. His son Howard was elected chairman, and Greg Abel, who took over as chief executive on January 1, 2026, continues to run the company.

One of the businesses he leaves behind is NetJets, the fractional ownership company Berkshire bought in 1998 for $725 million. NetJets and NetJets Europe operated 868 aircraft as of August 2026.

Southwest Airlines operated 803. Southwest has no regional affiliate, so 803 is its entire fleet.

Measured in airplanes, the private jet company is bigger than the airline.

Buffett Bought It Because His Family Was Already Flying It

The company was not Buffett’s idea. Richard Santulli bought a charter operator called Executive Jet in 1984 and built the fractional ownership model around it, selling shares in a specific aircraft rather than whole airplanes.

Buffett arrived as a customer. His family bought a quarter share in a NetJets aircraft in 1995, flew it for three years, and then he bought the company, with the purchase announced in July 1998 at $725 million, half of it paid in Berkshire stock.

That is a conversion story for a man who had spent years mocking corporate aviation in his shareholder letters, and who eventually bought a used business jet of his own and nicknamed it The Indefensible. He sold it in 1998 and has owned no aircraft since.

The reason the fleet grew so large is structural, and it is the opposite of how an airline works. An airline consolidates demand: it gathers 175 strangers who want to be in Denver at the same time and puts them on one airplane.

A fractional operator sells the opposite promise. Its customers are buying guaranteed availability on short notice from whichever airport they happen to be near, which means the fleet has to be dispersed rather than concentrated.

Serving a few thousand share owners that way takes hundreds of small jets parked in the right places. Serving an airline’s passengers takes far fewer and far larger airplanes flying fixed schedules.

868 Aircraft, and About 100 More Every Year

Here is where NetJets sits among the largest US operators. Every figure below counts airframes, and the airline numbers are mainline fleets only.

Operator	Aircraft	As of
United Airlines (mainline)	1,135	August 2026
American Airlines (mainline)	1,030	June 2026
Delta Air Lines (mainline)	About 990	Mid 2026
NetJets (US and Europe)	868	August 2026
Southwest Airlines	803	June 2026

The growth is recent and it is fast. The NetJets fleet ran 781 aircraft in February 2025, 826 that December, 845 in March 2026, 858 in May, and 868 by August.

It is also far more concentrated than any airline fleet. The Cessna Citation Latitude alone accounted for 262 airframes in August 2026, nearly a third of the total.

Behind it sat 169 Embraer Phenom 300s, then 94 each of the Bombardier Challenger 350 and the Cessna Citation Longitude, and 64 Challenger 650s.

That buying power makes NetJets the most important customer several manufacturers have. Just over half its fleet came from Textron Aviation as of March 2026, which is why Textron’s slower jet deliveries in the second quarter of 2026 are a NetJets problem as much as a Textron one.

Abel has said NetJets expects to take delivery of around 100 aircraft in 2026 and again in 2027. No airline outside the big three adds airplanes at that rate.

Why 868 Jets Is Not the Same as 803 Airliners

The comparison is real, but it only holds for the thing it measures, and the distinction is worth stating plainly because the headline number invites the wrong conclusion.

Southwest’s fleet is all Boeing 737s, every one of which seats well over a hundred people. A Citation Latitude seats nine, and most NetJets flights carry fewer.

So Southwest can put well over 100,000 seats in the air on its 803 airplanes. NetJets, on more aircraft, can offer a few thousand. In passengers moved, the two businesses are not in the same industry, which is also the honest answer to the private jet versus first class question.

What the airframe count does measure is operational footprint: flights, crews, maintenance bases, ramp space, and slots in the national airspace system. On that measure NetJets behaves like a major carrier.

It also means the company turns up in the incident record the way an airline does. In August 2026 a NetJets Cessna Citation Longitude inbound from Washington Dulles landed nose gear up at Akron Canton after its landing gear failed to extend.

Nobody was hurt. It is the sort of event that happens to an operator flying hundreds of aircraft every day, and almost never to one flying six.

The Constraint Is Now Supply, Not Demand

The business Buffett hands over has the opposite problem from the one he bought. Selling fractions of airplanes in 1998 meant persuading people that the idea made sense at all.

Demand is no longer the question. Private flight activity in the first half of 2026 ran about 35 percent above pre-pandemic 2019 levels, according to WingX data, and 2026 is tracking as a record year.

In July 2026 NetJets responded by curtailing jet card sales and restricting sales of leases, and not for the first time.

That is a company rationing its own product. At roughly 100 deliveries a year, the fleet cannot grow fast enough to sell to everyone who wants in, and the manufacturers have their own delivery problems.

Buffett paid $725 million in 1998 for a company whose hardest job was convincing anyone to buy. Twenty eight years later it flies more airplanes than Southwest Airlines, and its hardest job is finding enough of them.