Fire Up the Gulf Stream! The History of Corporate PJs

Your forecast was right. Until something changed.

A deal slips. Hiring speeds up. Costs come in higher than expected. Suddenly someone wants to know what that means for the rest of the year.

The old answer? Duplicate the model, change a few assumptions, fix everything that broke, and hope you're comparing the right versions.

Abacum makes the "what if" part the easy part. Build scenarios off your actual plan, change the assumptions that matter, and see the impact flow through the business.

Because scenario planning shouldn't be a modeling exercise. It should help you answer the question everyone actually cares about:

So, what should we do next?

Taking the corporate jet anywhere fun this summer?

Are you flying friends and family to the island of of Sardinia to celebrate your significant other’s 40th birthday (on the company’s dime)?

If so, don’t end up in jail like Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco did!

This is, bar none, the most fun breakdown I’ve done on a “corporate” topic before. If you’ve ever struggled to properly book a Net Jets expense in NetSuite (ok, maybe that was just me) or wondered where corporate aviation showed up in the financial statements depending on if you buy, lease, or charter, this is the guide to PJs you’ve been waiting for.

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Above you’ll find it in documentary format. And below you’ll find it in written format. Enjoy.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp spent a reported $17 million on private aviation last year.

The stock is also the best performing company of the year.

So do we care?

Today we’re going to dig into corporate aviation. Or said another way, private jets and the employees and execs who get to use them.

There are a lot of videos breaking down the differences between jet cards and fractional ownership and how much it takes to buy a jet outright. While we’ll explore the different options to fly from one place to another, this is less about the ultra wealthy living lavish lives, and more about the business and financial implications of traveling privately. Where does it show up on the company financial statements, what does it say about corporate governance, and what’s the ROI?

So for all my homies sitting in the middle seat on Delta, strap in and get ready, this is a CFO explains corporate jets.

The origins of private corporate aviation tie back to Sam Walton of Walmart fame. The CEO regularly flew small, private planes to scout new store locations. He began doing this in the 1950s because stores were spread across super remote areas in the south and midwest, with limited access to highways.

Producer Ben: A 90 minute flight sounds way better than a winding 8 hour drive. 

Sam flew many of these planes himself. And they were far from lavish. Over the years he piloted several aircrafts, starting with a model called an Ercoupe, which, for the record, does not look safe, and later upgrading to a slightly bigger twin engine Cessna 414 to achieve greater range.

These early planes could fly roughly 430 miles on a single tank of gas, and his dog, Ol’ Roy, frequently rode in the cabin with him. 

Producer Ben: Bringing your dog to work. Another perk of flying private.

Sam Walton bought his first plane, the eight-year-old used Ercoupe Model 415-C, for $1,850, which would pay for roughly 12 minutes on a net jets charter today. He traveled from Arkansas to Oklahoma City to buy it, and his brother Bud mocked him, saying it didn’t even look like an airplane. 

Sam visited two to three stores a day. He’d fly in, spend a few hours walking the floors, and repeat the process until he, quote, "couldn't look at any more”. He’d spend time talking with front line managers, eating lunch with cashiers, and scribbling notes on yellow legal pads on what he observed was working and what was not. 

On weekends he’d shift his focus to what he called scout flights, where he’d fly over dozens of small towns in a day, mapping out future Walmart locations from the cockpit and counting cars in competitor parking lots.

Producer Ben : The man literally looked at traffic patterns and counted cars.

Since then, the Walmart private jet fleet has evolved from a $1,850 two seater airplane into one of the largest corporate jet fleets in the world. In 1968 Sam and his brother Bud established Walmart Aviation, hiring their first professional corporate pilots to shuttle Walmart executives between the HQ in Bentonville, Arkansas and locations across the south and midwest. They used small propeller planes, built for speed and efficiency rather than luxury. 

Producer Ben: There were no peanuts served, you couldn't really talk because it was loud, and the cabins were not even pressurized. 

The goal was to shuttle teams to 2 or 3 remote stores, let them do floor inspections, and shuttle them back to Bentonville by nightfall so Walmart wouldn't have to pay for hotel rooms. 

Walton had a strict no overnight stay rule that dictated Walmart execs and buyers traveling on business to complete their work and stay home the exact same day to avoid overnight hotel stays. Walton hated spending money on corporate travel expenses because he believed those costs were ultimately passed on to the customer.

Producer Ben: But isn’t flying a plane more expensive than a hotel room?

While it sounds contradictory for a famously frugal billionaire, Walton viewed aircraft as a high-speed business tool rather than a luxury. 

His thinking on why the aviation fleet actually saved Walmart millions of dollars comes down to three main factors:

Eliminating the "Lost Opportunity Cost" of Travel Time

Squeezing Multiple Cities Into One Day

And Spreading the Flying Costs Across 6 to 8 People rather than buying each a hotel room

Ultimately, Walton calculated that the physical fuel and maintenance of a twin-engine Cessna was vastly cheaper than having his top management teams trapped in remote hotels, wasting valuable working hours

Producer Ben: I bet there are some funny stories given how frugal the guy was.

Sam Walton would load these planes with buyers and real estate managers. Since he hated paying for co-pilots, he would routinely look back into the passenger cabin, point at an executive who had no aviation experience, and say, "If something happens to me, you're flying this thing. Here's how you level the wings.”

And because Bentonville didn't have radar or advanced airport tech at the time, Walton frequently flew in terrible weather. He nearly crashed multiple times; once landing a plane on a dark, unlit rural runway by using the headlights of a manager's car parked at the end of the strip to guide him down.

Producer Ben: So not exactly safe or glamorous early flight days

By the 1980s, Walmart reached $1 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history. The old piston planes were too slow, so Walmart transitioned into Turboprops, planes with propeller blades driven by jet engines

In the 1980s they came up with a concept for visiting stores called the flight grid. The "Flight Grid" was a precision-timed, Monday-through-Thursday shuttle designed to maximize productivity and eliminate hotel costs for Walmart employees. 

Keep this in mind for when we discuss Google and Netflix shuttling employees later on.

Using a "drop-and-go" loop, multiple King Air planes would shuttle buyers to regional airstrips in the morning, where they would visit stores before being picked up in the late afternoon to return to Arkansas. This schedule, which excluded Fridays and Saturdays to allow for mandatory weekend meetings, ensured all employees were back in Bentonville for the legendary Saturday morning meeting.

During the 1980s, buying a new Beechcraft King Air cost between $1.5 million and $3.2 million depending on the specific model, while operating them cost roughly $400 to $700 per flight hour.

Producer Ben: So what happened next?

As Walmart expanded into a nationwide coast-to-coast retailer, the slow 250-mph Beechcraft King Airs could no longer cover the necessary distance in a single day. 

Walmart began standardizing its fleet with Bombardier Learjets, specifically purchasing massive batches of the Learjet 31 and later the Learjet 45. These twin-turbofan jets flew at over 500 mph, allowing the "Flight Grid" to expand its daily reach to the West Coast and Northeast for the first time.

And when Walmart went international, expanding into Canada, Mexico, and South America, they stationed permanent regional jets at international home offices to clone the Bentonville flight layout

Today, Walmart operates a modernized corporate jet network out of a massive, wholly owned terminal facility located eight miles from its Bentonville headquarters. While they don’t own the airport itself, they own the entire terminal network operating inside of it. They have fully standardized a fleet of roughly 15 to 22 modern, ultra-efficient business jets

Producer Ben: What do these planes run you?

The planes inside their fleet range from $6 million on the low end, like the Cessna Citation Sovereign, to the Bombardier Global 7500, clocking in at $75 million.

Producer Ben: Did you pull that from their financial statements?

While Walmart doesn’t specifically break out corporate aviation as a single line, you can back into a figure of $40 million to $60 million per year for the operations and maintenance, which does not include the purchasing of jets. Which, like, cost a lot.

So let’s talk about where this stuff shows up on the financials

There are two common places for this to show up in the SEC filings. Walmart’s official SEC financial disclosures explicitly track and justify corporate aircraft usage under two separate regulatory categories: executive compensation and corporate operational tracking.

The broad operational expenses (fuel, hangar leases, pilot salaries) are bundled under standard "Selling, General, and Administrative" (SG&A) expenses in their Annual 10-K Reports.

Producer Ben: Can we go any deeper than that?

The deeper operational realities are legally exposed through their yearly Definitive Proxy Statements (Form DEF 14A). Think about this as the footnote report that companies need to disclose each year before their annual shareholder meeting. The purpose is to give shareholders a peek into details around executive comp and spending habits so they can make better decisions when they vote. Every publicly traded corporation's proxy statement acts as a transparency report

Producer Ben: I feel like you’re about to drop some serious tables on me.

It contains a comprehensive "Summary Compensation Table" outlining the total compensation packages for the CEO, CFO, and top three other highest-paid executives. This includes base salaries, performance bonuses, stock awards, and all fringe benefits, which is where personal travel on corporate aircraft must be calculated and itemized by law.

Walmart clarifies in its SEC filings that incremental cost is calculated strictly based on variable operating costs. This includes fuel, landing fees, trip-related hangar costs, in-flight catering, and crew travel expenses. It legally excludes fixed costs like pilot salaries, aircraft depreciation, and insurance because the company pays those regardless of whether the flight is personal or business

Producer Ben: Is there a limit to these benefits?

Historic filings outline that a standard annual cap of personal flight allowance for a top Named Executive Officer typically totals between $130,000 and $400,000 a year. If an executive exceeds their hours, they are billed directly or face tax adjustments. While the amounts are set by Walmart’s board, this is a strict legal rule mandated by the federal government for all public corporations, not just a Walmart-specific policy.

Producer Ben: A little bit more on this for all our tax junkies out there.

Well, if you really want me to go there. Under SEC Regulation S-K (Item 402), any personal use of a corporate jet by a Named Executive Officer (NEO) is legally defined as a perk

If an executive’s total annual perks exceed $10,000, the company is legally required to disclose the exact "aggregate incremental cost" of those personal flights in their public proxy statements.

Failing to accurately track and report this can trigger federal fraud investigations because the IRS views personal use of a company jet as a taxable fringe benefit

Producer Ben: That sounds like the type of stuff that would easily make a good news headline.

So many good headlines. This part was fun to research. In 2021, the SEC cracked down on Gulfport Energy Corporation after discovering that its CEO had failed to disclose over $650,000 in personal corporate jet perks. The CEO routinely used the company's chartered jets to fly himself and his wife to high-stakes poker tournaments in Las Vegas and exclusive wine tastings in Napa Valley. Gulfport shuffled these trips as "business travel," failing to report them to shareholders on their DEF 14A proxy statements. The SEC cited the company for major internal accounting control failures.

So in October of 2018, immediately after the board's audit committee discovered the unauthorized aircraft and credit card usage, Moore resigned. They demanded he personally pay back the $649,200 in unauthorized private jet costs, along with the personal charges he had racked up on his corporate credit card. 

Producer Ben: I bet he wasn’t using brex.

In addition, in 2021, without admitting or denying the findings, Moore agreed to a cease-and-desist order and paid a cash fine of $88,248 for violating federal anti-fraud and proxy laws. This kept him out of jail.

The people at Tyco International were not so lucky. 

Producer Ben: The toy company?

Yes. The scandal remains the ultimate warning story of corporate jet fraud, culminating in CEO Dennis Kozlowski and CFO Mark Swartz being convicted of multi-million dollar grand larceny and sentenced to up to 25 years in state prison.

In 2001, Kozlowski threw an infamous, Roman-empire-themed 40th birthday party for his wife on the Italian island of Sardinia. He used Tyco's corporate jet to fly dozens of family members and friends across the Atlantic. He then forced Tyco to pay half of the $2 million party bill, fraudulently logging the trip as a "corporate retreat." 

Producer Ben: You can’t make this stuff up.

The executives routinely ordered Tyco pilots to run empty legs to transport friends, mistresses, and relatives to vacation homes in Key West and New England.

Because these flights were classified internally as official corporate business, neither executive declared the flights on their W-2 forms as imputed income, resulting in massive, deliberate federal and state tax fraud.

Kozlowski served nearly 7 years in a medium-security facility before being granted work release and eventually paroled in 2014. Swartz was paroled in 2013.

In addition to their prison sentences, Kozlowski and Swartz were hit with massive civil judgments. They were ordered to pay a combined $134 million in direct restitution back to Tyco, and Kozlowski was forced to pay an individual $70 million criminal fine. 

Producer Ben: I bet the roman party was pretty sick though.

Fraud aside, let’s talk about the modern corporate jet use cases and where they can be useful.

The first use case is actually mandated by major boards. Security.

At major corporations (like Apple, Meta, or Walmart), the Board of Directors legally requires that the CEO must fly private for all travel. This isn’t about luxury, but keeping them and the information they hold safe. 

Producer Ben: Imagine Tim Cook traveling through a Tulsa regional airport. 

It protects the CEO from public threats and ensures they can work on highly confidential documents in a secure cabin. 

Producer Ben: Or Brian Armstrong of coinbase flipping through M&A docs on a Southwest Airlines flight?

And second, Boards grant top executives a set number of personal flight hours per year as part of their executive compensation package (like flying their family to a ski resort or a beachfront home). The company must track every drop of fuel for these personal flights. The value is added to the executive's W-2 as untaxed compensation, and the exact dollar amount must be publicly exposed in the SEC Proxy Statement (DEF 14A) as we discussed earlier

Producer Ben: Maybe you can hit on where these costs hit the financial statements

The ongoing, day-to-day costs of keeping the planes in the air hit the Profit & Loss statement immediately, but they are categorized based on why the plane flew. 

If the flight was for a legitimate business trip, 100% of the variable costs (fuel, landing fees, in-flight catering, pilot per diems) are booked under general administrative overhead

If the flight was for the CEO's personal vacation, that specific portion of the variable cost is stripped out of general overhead and booked as an executive compensation expense

And if the company owns the jet, a portion of the plane's aging value is written off every single year as a non-cash expense on the P&L, lowering the company's net income.

Producer Ben: So some of this jet stuff is an income statement problem and some of it is a balance sheet thing.

Now, the Balance Sheet tracks the actual value of the aircraft asset and the debt used to secure it. How it looks depends entirely on the corporate financing model, or how you bought it.

If the Company OWNS the Jet Outright the multi-million dollar purchase price of the jet is listed as a long-term, non-current Asset under PP&E (property plant and equipment). Every year, as depreciation hits the P&L, the asset value of the plane shrinks on the balance sheet.

If the company took out a loan to buy the plane, the remaining loan balance sits on the right side of the balance sheet under Liabilities.

Let’s talk about leasing. Because if the Company LEASES the Jet (which would fall under fractional ownership) it gets treated differently. Following major accounting rule updates (ASC 842), companies can no longer hide private jet leases off the books. 

Producer Ben: Sneaky sneaky! I love a good off balance sheet item!

This is where something called a Right-of-Use (ROU) Asset comes in. The company must calculate the total future value of their jet lease and list it as an asset on the balance sheet. And since it’s duel entry accounting, the off setting item is a Lease Liability: An equal dollar amount representing the future lease payments must be listed as a corresponding liability

Producer Ben: There have to be some loopholes though, right?

Well, there is a fractional charter loop hole. Many modern companies avoid the massive balance sheet headache of owning a $50 million jet by using on-demand charter services or jet cards

Under this model, nothing ever touches the Balance Sheet because the company doesn't own or lease an asset. Owning and leasing trigger balance sheet hits.

Instead, they simply pay a pre negotiated hourly invoice (like., $8,000/hour). The entire cost hits the P&L instantly as a straight SG&A travel expense, allowing the company to keep their capital structure incredibly lean.

Producer Ben: Well, in that sense, a $50,000 private jet flight looks identical on a ledger to a $50,000 bill for software. 

Right. Without forensics and super sleuthing, outside investors cannot separate actual private flying overhead from routine business travel. 

Since an on-demand charter or a 25-hour jet-card does not give the corporation exclusive "control over a specific, identified physical asset" (you just use whatever plane the charter broker sends that day), it is legally classified as a service contract, not a lease, skipping out on ASC 842. Furthermore, it avoids the extensive, legally mandated "Lease Commitment Footnotes" at the bottom of the financial statements, leaving zero paper trail on the balance sheet

Producer Ben: OK, chief. A little over board on the footnotes. Reel it back in here.

The only place an on-demand charter must be explicitly exposed to the public is inside the Form DEF 14A (Proxy Statement)—but only if a top executive uses that charter for a personal vacation.

If the CEO uses an on-demand charter to fly to a client dinner (even if the location happens to be a high-end golf resort), the company logs it as a legitimate business expense. It goes straight into the SG&A black box, and the executive's name is completely shielded from public perk disclosures.

Producer Ben: Can we do some super sleuthing now?

Because the financial statements hide these costs so well, institutional investors and forensic short-sellers look outside the financial reporting entirely. They use data tools to audit what companies are actually spending on flight hours:

The first is FAA IFR Flight Registries. They use these to cross-reference tail numbers belonging to major fractional providers (like NetJets or Wheels Up) with airports situated near corporate headquarters or executive residences.

This entire crowd-sourced movement bypasses corporate accounting concealment because it does not look at the money, but the radio signals broadcasted by the airplanes coming and going themselves. 

Producer Ben: Crowdsourcing and twitter, for the win.

Every modern aircraft is legally required to emit a radio signal called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast). Every second, a private jet broadcasts its exact GPS coordinates, altitude, speed, and a unique 24-bit aircraft identification code to the ground.

Several prominent websites and tracking projects aggregate this raw data to create public transparency scorecards:

Jack Sweeney, an information technology student at the University of Central Florida, became a global transparency icon by writing automated code that publicly broadcast the real-time movements of the world’s most powerful billionaires and celebrities. Sweeney first made global headlines through his automated X (then Twitter) account, @ElonJet, which tracked Elon Musk’s private Gulfstream

In late 2021, Musk directly messaged the teenager, calling the account a security risk and offering $5,000 to shut it down. Sweeney famously countered, asking for $50,000 or a Tesla Model 3 to help pay for college. Musk ghosted the offer

Eventually Sweeney moved to a 24 hour delay for security concerns.

Producer Ben: Is that the same guy who doxxed taylor swift for her flights?

Nailed it. But let’s stick to business. Back to the financials. Focus, Ben. Focus.

Producer Ben: So how much are major companies in 2026 spending on corporate aviation?

Companies like Walmart and Meta who operate tier 1 mega fleets spend in the ballpark of $30m to $50M a year to operate aircrafts, excluding the cost to purchase them in the first place. We’re talking 15 to 25 aircrafts, with global operational bases, hundreds of crew members, and international hubs.

The next tier are those who aren’t exactly global but still have dedicated fleets, concentrating more on domestic travel. 

This is the likes of Apple and Netflix, shuttling up and down the west coast. These fleets may consist of 5 to 10 wholly owned midsize to heavy jets, with dedicated regional commutes, and corporate shuttles. 

Netflix is known to shuttle multiple planes per day between SF and LA, colloquially called the Los Altos Commuter. 

This category will run you $15M to $30M a year to play in.

And the third category are those relying upon fractional and on demand services, split between leasing (balance sheet item) and chartering (the purely P&L item). This is your block of net jet hours and ad hoc charters, running between $5,000 to $15,000 per hour.

Producer Ben: How do you decided where to play? Is it driven by usage?

The financial decision to move up the ladder from Charter, to Fractional leases, to Wholly Owned is driven by hours. 

From 0 to 50 hours you probably charter each individual flight. 

From 50 to 200 hours your buy jet cards from flex jets or net jets, which is really just prepaying (cash out the door today) for a pre negotiated number of hours at a fixed price for better forecasting. 

Past 200 hours and up to 400 hours you look into leasing, or what’s known as fractional ownership, say 1/8th of a plane. And past 400 hours a year you should think about owning the plane outright. Now you’re on the balance sheet.

And once an aircraft is flying more than 400 hours a year, you own. The variable cost of flying your own plane drops to its absolute lowest baseline (just the raw price of fuel and basic maintenance reserves).

Producer Ben: Why haven’t you talked about depreciation yet? Isn’t that a benefit?

Yes, there’s one more accounting based benefit of owning: bonus depreciation. Under Internal Revenue Code Section 168(k), corporations can immediately deduct up to 100% of the purchase price of a capital asset—like a private jet—in the exact year it is placed in service, rather than writing it off slowly over decades. 

For a company deciding whether to upgrade from chartering to whole ownership, this rule accelerates the financial math in favor of owning. Writing off a multi-million dollar asset in Year 1 slashes a corporation's taxable income, creating an immediate, massive cash-flow subsidy from the government

This tax rule was scheduled to phase out by 2027, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act brought it back from the brink of extinction, permanently restoring 100% bonus depreciation for qualifying assets acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025

Producer Ben: That was a close one for rich people.

And by the way, for those in the market but looking to buy used, the 100% immediate write-off applies to both brand-new factory deliveries and pre-owned aircraft acquired on the secondary market. 

And it’s worth it to know that the majority of companies buy used planes, not because they have to, but because planes lose about 10% in value per year and have longer lives than cars on the road, which makes for a better deal.

But be careful. If the corporate jet's qualified business usage drops below the 50% threshold at any point during its standard tax life, the deduction is retroactively broken and you get sent to depreciation prison.

Producer Ben: Is that a real place?

Ask the Tyco guys.

Producer Ben: So it all begs the question: should we care if execs are using corporate planes?

I suppose it all comes down to a company's health. Looking purely at the "CEO’s hourly worth" versus the cost of a flight is an oversimplification. It’s super simple high level math.

Yes, they get paid a ton per hour when you factor in their stock based compensation, and you wouldn’t want Jensen Huang falling asleep during a keynote because he took the red eye from SF to JFK. Not good for stock price. 

Producer Ben: So how do you weigh it all?

I think there are three angles to review here.

The first is corporate governance. The explicit dollar cost of running a corporate jet (even $30 million a year) is statistically invisible "noise" to a mega-cap company generating $50 billion in revenue. 

However, academic and forensic financial studies show that private jet usage is one of the strongest leading indicators of poor corporate governance.

When a board blindly approves unlimited personal jet perks, it signals that the compensation committee is captured by the CEO rather than protecting shareholder capital.

Studies from the Journal of Financial Economics demonstrated that companies whose CEOs flew private extensively for personal use underperformed the broader market by an average of 4% per year, while their Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) eroded. 

Producer Ben: Do they not have wifi on the planes or something?

While the jet itself didn't cause the drop, there was a strong correlation between, the entitlement required to abuse the jet correlated with reckless managerial decision-making elsewhere

Producer Ben: So the jet use is correlated with bad decisions.

The second angle is opportunity cost

If a tech CEO uses a jet to close a $2 billion cross-border acquisition or a retail founder uses it to audit 10 stores in 3 days, the jet is a super high-yield tool. The compressed timeline generates a massive Return on real assets. 

There’s also something to be said about quality of life as an exec. Aside from the hourly cost of flying, an exec who is not forced to change their circadian rhythm each week and gets to see their family more often is probably in a better mental state. 

Producer Ben: I don’t have mathematically evidence on this, but I once gave a presentation after a redeye and had serious potato brain.

The third angle is somewhat related to the first. Size. 

It’s the P&L gouging of midcap stocks. Chances are, you do not have apple’s market cap. While a private jet budget is a rounding error for Apple or Microsoft, it drastically impacts the financial metrics of Small-Cap and Mid-Cap corporations.

If a company with $100 million in annual net income spends $15 million a year maintaining a fleet, that single expense crushes their Operating Margin and slashes Earnings Per Share by a measurable percentage.

In these tiers, institutional investors actively fight private aviation overhead because that capital could be more profitably deployed into Research & Development or direct share buybacks.

Producer Ben: Come on, give us one more example of going too far.

Fine. Perhaps the craziest example of taking it too far with corporate jets was Jeff Immelt at GE. Short sellers discovered that whenever his corporate jet flew (even to Europe and Asia) he had a second, identical and completely empty backup plane follow his exact flight path. 

Immelt had an unwritten internal policy that a "shadow jet" must follow him around the world just in case his primary plane suffered a mechanical delay.

Producer Ben: The short sellers must have had a field day.

As you might imagine, Trian Fund Management leveraged the flight data to build a devastating narrative for institutional shareholders, creating an optical nightmare. While Immelt was traveling the globe with two multi-million dollar jets, he was actively telling Wall Street that GE was undergoing an "aggressive cost-cutting transformation."

Under intense pressure from short sellers and the rest of the board, Immelt was forced to resign as CEO in mid-2017. And the very first operational action taken by his successor, John Flannery, was to completely ground and liquidate GE’s corporate jet fleet to immediately save millions in SG&A overhead

Producer Ben: So, back to Alex Karp and that $17 million.

For Palantir? Who cares. They do more than that in revenue in the time it took me to write this breakdown. And if the board wants to keep their CEO off a commercial concourse where some rando could film him reading defense contracts in seat 14B, then $17 million is honestly a steal. That's not the jet spend that should worry you.

I’d be more worried about the ones who say one thing and do another. If you are at a $2 billion market cap company, what does it say about your decision making and ethics if you’re using shareholder money to fly you around the country.

Much like any financial calculation, it comes down to the net present value of the cash flows you can produce from the business activities you are undertaking. Private jets don’t fit cleanly into a discounted cash flow model, but it’s pretty easy to gut check if the security and opportunity costs are worth it.

The decision to spend money on private jets is in very many ways a test as to how you make decisions throughout the rest of your company. Because for CEOs and CFOs, the job is resource allocation, whether those assets are on land or air.

And for the record, I'm writing this from a middle seat with my knees somewhere near my sternum, so weigh my objectivity accordingly.

Wishing you a fully expensed aisle seat,

PEACE

Wishing you trade at a high revenue and EBITDA multiple,

CJ