It turned out to be the very moment private jets went from being merely an exclusive form of fast transportation to a form of rarefied and much-coveted currency. When he opened the box, Forstmann found a bloated, poorly run business.
He was pissed. The deal became legendary on Wall Street. What about some options? Strauss conceded that point to Forstmann and then discussed the novel request with the Gulfstream board. Needless to say, Forstmann got his own personal Gulfstream V. O ne of the revelations of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was the degree to which the private jet has become the definitive, highly overdetermined artifact of modern super money culture.
Donald Trump has placed a model of one of the two yet-to-be-configured Air Force Ones smack-dab in the middle of the Oval Office. Harvard scientists, Nobel Prize winners, narcissistic defense attorneys love to fly private too. Setting foot on the tarmac confers an irresistible, intoxicating feeling of specialness.
Avoiding security is the very definition of modern luxury, marking a bright line between private-jet owners and their lucky guests, and the merely rich.
Even first-class commercial fliers, with their little glasses of Champagne, their special blankets, are schmucks, fenced off in pens, forced to take off their shoes like everyone else. The Good Life Aquatic. Private jets have become the essential element of modern superrich business and pleasure infrastructure, woven in deeply, the communal living space for the most acquisitive, rapacious people in the world.
