Bernard Arnault, the world’s third-richest man, has managed to fly under the radar of the Twitterverse.
Tired of having his flights tracked all the time, French billionaire Bernard Arnault’s luxury goods company LVMH recently sold its US$73 million Bombardier Global 7500, Arnault said on Radio Classique: “I Fly Bernard and Bernard’s Airplane have been tracking the private jet and its carbon footprint on Twitter.”
Billionaires’ private jets have become such a hot topic that politicians have proposed taxing or outright prohibiting them. Arnault, for his part, is still flying around; he’s just renting planes to fly under the radar. This move could set a precedent for other disgruntled CEOs.
The billionaire is probably less concerned with having his carbon footprint tracked and more concerned with inadvertently revealing plans and deals. Antoine Arnault, his son, defended the use of a private jet for business, calling it 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 CEOs’ private jets for years, with some paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to track these deal-making executives’ movements.
Earlier this year, Jack Sweeney, 20, went viral after launching the Twitter bot Elon Musk’s Jet to track Elon Musk’s flights. Soon after, the world’s richest man must have become so irritated that he offered to buy Twitter.
With jet-tracking becoming a major issue for the ultra-rich, the FAA has started a discussion about how to better block websites like ADS-B Exchange. The FAA discussed how to mitigate real-time tracking at the National Business Aviation Association’s conference in mid-October, but admitted that “there are no silver bullets.”
Sweeney shared a slide from the FAA’s conference presentation with Insider, outlining ways the planes can still be tracked, such as through LiveATC, which is real-time air traffic control conversation, and common departure airports.
“Elon Musk, for example, has a Gulfstream and there’s only so many people that fly that particular plane out of Brownsville, Texas, and fly to the same airports,” Sweeney told Insider.
