this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Ok? A reasonable person doesn’t have a fucn private jet and those who do should pay taxes???? We’re people owning large polluting private vehicles not paying taxes????
EXACTLY why I crossposted it in !nottheonion@lemmy.world.
The entire thing reads like The Onion satirizing clueless rich people, except with all of the wit removed.
It was actually written by a guy who runs a charter jet company. The target audience quite literally is people who can afford to fly private. It helps him to sell a bit more outrage over what's actually completely sensible.
Good thing that it's extremely unlikely that there's any potential customers of his lurking on Lemmy, then 😁
Pretty damn unlikely indeed. The kind of people that he could persuade to sell a private jet and save money by chartering don't exactly have a lot of time for social media unless it's something like xitter or reddit or instagram, which they only use to market their shit. Either they're too busy working, or too busy enjoying all their wealth.
With "working" usually consisting of a bunch of optional meetings where everyone has to cater to their whims and business lunches that would make the Editor in Chief of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy blush, of course.
Some of those lunches would even outdo Petronius.
I'm lucky enough that the few rich people I've personally interacted with, haven't been such insufferable pricks.
If I give any real information, I'll probably dox myself to any of my old coworkers, but old boss and his wife were super hard workers, net worth in the high tens or perhaps even a few hundred million. They spent a couple of decades building the company, no outside investment (he was the founder, but she joined him when it was still pretty tiny). At the end of it, she wanted to sell and retire, he was unable to let go of his "baby". So he killed himself, she brought in private equity and everything went to shit just as I was leaving anyway.
They held a bunch of meetings too, but it was product design and direction related any time I had to join one. And they actually knew the needs of the target audience of the product we were building - I did not, as it was VERY far removed from my job as a software engineer. Essentially they functioned as analysts or project managers, except with 3 or 4 decades of experience working on the same product. They'd also interact directly with customers for product feedback, including some they'd managed to retain for nearly 2 decades.
There was another company where the owners and leadership were much worse, but I never personally interacted with the CEO. He was pretty close to what you describe, with the business lunches and everything, but then again he brought on multi-billion dollar companies as customers so it seems that bullshit works lol. Personally, I'm an introvert who needs to recharge after prolonged socialization, but I'm also a social butterfly who can chat for hours and bullshit through anything, so I could probably pull that job off fairly easily, but I don't have the whole "bunch of multi-millionaires owe me some favours for shady shit I pulled years ago to make them richer" thing going on for me that getting that job in the first place requires.
This is the fundamental difference between a privately owned and publicly traded company.
A privately owned company is likely still owned by the guy who started it or someone he's directly involved with, who is still in it either just purely for the love of the game or because he genuinely wants to create a quality name that will live on beyond him.
A publicly traded company is owned by a school of rabid pirahnas that want to shake all the loose nickels out of it, and will pursue any self-destructive tendency if it generates a short-term return.
Rich folks who got that way by being real entrepreneurs generally tend to understand the value of hard work and personability. Rich folks who got that way by trading someone else's value, don't.
There is a reason founders are generally ejected when their businesses get big enough to go public. They tend to be obsessive micromanagers who abuse their staff.
Run by, not owned. You see how BlackRock and Vanguard are listed as major shareholders for all big publicly traded companies? Those are actually made up mostly of retail investors buying ETFs. But you don't control the shares you own through ETFs and the companies managing the ETFs tend not to actively manage anything either. It's a combination of the other shareholders who control the board, and they might not even own a very big part of the company in reality.
Truth is, privately owned companies can be even worse than public, but public is basically guaranteed to be bad.
There's different types of tax and different ways to skirt by.
A lot of taxes can be skirted by making your private jet owned by your company. Now it's a business expense, not taxable income. But of course the IRS isn't very happy about it if you use it for personal reasons. Of course most still will. VAT/Sales tax? Yea you get to claim that back in most countries if buying things as a business.
Then there's a whole other issue on lack of excise duty on jet fuel. This applies to both private jets and airlines. If you drive a car, you have to pay excise, but not if you fly. Yay! (Ideally, in my opinion, both should be taxed, but public transit (not airlines though) should receive an exemption for the excise similar to how farmers get it in my country). IIRC this is a global issue too.
You still end up paying minor amounts of tax on different things if you fly a private jet, even if it's owned by your company, but... percentage wise, it's nothing compared to a regular commuter who privately buys a car and fuels it up at a station.
Honestly, if not banning them altogether, private jets used by companies should at least be taxed as if they were owned by a private person. There's little business use case for being able to fly a tiny amount of people anywhere on a whim. It's purely for personal convenience of the ultra rich.
That’sa lotta words magic man… and we read them all thx this was very based and valid