Bernard Arnault, the world’s third-richest man has found a way to go under the Twitterverse’s radar.
Tired of having his flights tracked all the time, the French billionaire’s luxury goods company LVMH sold its US$73 million Bombardier Global 7500, Arnault said recently on Radio Classique. Twitter accounts like I Fly Bernard and Bernard’s Airplane have been tracking the private jet and its carbon footprint.
Billionaires’ private jets have become such a hot topic that politicians have proposed to tax them or ban them altogether. Arnault, for his part, is still flying all over, it’s just that now he’s renting planes to fly under the radar. This move could very well start a trend for similarly annoyed CEOs.
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The billionaire likely cares less about having his carbon footprint tracked and more about inadvertently revealing plans and deals. In a separate interview, his son Antoine Arnault defended the use of a private jet for business, saying it’s a “work tool” in a “hyper-competitive” industry.
“It’s not very good that our competitors can know where we are at any moment,” he added. “That can give ideas, it can also give leads, clues.”
Hedge funds have been tracking the private jets of CEOs for years, with some paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to see the movements of these deal-making executives.
Earlier this year, 19-year-old Jack Sweeney went viral after he launched the Twitter bot Elon Musk’s Jet to track the flights of Elon Musk. The world’s richest man must have gotten so annoyed that he offered to buy Twitter shortly after.
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