Billionaire sells private jet to escape climate activists
Bernard Arnault, the owner of luxury-goods brand Louis Vuitton, told French Radio Classique on Monday that he had sold his private jet.
“Indeed … the group [Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton or LVMH] had a plane and we sold it. The result now is that no one can see where I go because I now rent planes,” Arnault told the media.
The move came after Twitter was flooded with accounts such as ‘i_fly_Bernard’ and ‘laviondebernard’, which tracked Arnault’s private aircraft and reported on its carbon footprint or the atmospheric pollution it caused.
The plane, a Canada-made Bombardier Global 7500, is reportedly the largest business jet currently on the market. According to Reuters, the price of a new Bombardier 7500 started at $73 million back in 2019. Renting one costs around $10,650 an hour, according to the Paramount Business Jet website. Media reports claim Arnault used his jet quite often. A 2019 report by Forbes claimed he traveled in the private plane at least once a month.
Arnault’s son, Antoine Arnault, said in the same radio interview that having other people know where the company jet is located is not only inconvenient but also bad for business.
“It’s not very good that our competitors can know where we are at any moment. That can give ideas, it can also give leads clues,” he stated.
Arnault’s net worth amounts to roughly $134 billion, which makes him the world’s third-richest man after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Musk also has a number of Twitter ‘followers’ that track and scrutinize his travels. Last year, a US student set up the Twitter account ‘ElonJet’ to track Musk’s private aircraft using publicly available air-traffic information. The entrepreneur offered the teen $5,000 to shut down the account. The youth demanded $50,000 instead, which Musk did not respond to.
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