What a $75 Million Airplane Actually Costs to Own

**Israel Slodowitz** (0:00)
Not flying blind. My name is Israel Slodowitz. I'm the founder and CEO of Craft. OpenAI just announced that they're going to be public. We're seeing not just insane wealth creation moment, probably the largest we've seen in the history of humankind, but we're also seeing shift in how people spend their wealth. The most sought after thing once you make some money is start flying private. It's like the one thing everybody looks to do. It's truly a unique tool that nothing else replaces.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:25)
What does Jeff Bezos have? What does Elon Musk have?

**Israel Slodowitz** (0:29)
When you think about the Jeff Bezos of the world and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, they're typically G700, global 8,000 category. That's the top of the line. If you buy a $10 million airplane, you can take a $10 million business deduction the year you bought the plane.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:43)
This is why people are buying $75 million airplanes.

**Israel Slodowitz** (0:46)
That's exactly what people are buying. There's no other good reason.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:58)
Izzy, welcome to Sourcery.

**Israel Slodowitz** (1:00)
Good to be here, thank you.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:01)
What are we doing right now?

**Israel Slodowitz** (1:03)
Where are we? We're sitting on a Challenger 350
This is a super mid-aircraft. That's, you can fly coast to coast, New York to California, you can fly California to Hawaii or to Europe. This is one of the aircraft that we operate in our charter company. I operate a part 135 charter company that I started six years ago while I was still in college. We now operate a fleet of these. We have pilots and we fly them all year round. We do a lot of supplemental flights for NetJets and FlexJet and Wheels Up and all the large providers.
I'm excited to talk to you about what we're building and about the industry.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:39)
I'm excited. I came across you guys through LinkedIn in these posts. You were doing some collaborative posts with some of the interviews that we've done.
I did this amazing series with Michelle Del Buono of A16Z Perennial, which is Mark and Ben's multifamily office. We did two episodes so far and it's all centered on the major wealth creation event that's happening right now.
We're about to have more millionaires and billionaires minted than ever before with the OpenAI, SpaceX IPO, Anthropic IPO, the Cerebras one that just happened, and all the secondaries and tenders that are going on also behind the surface. But right now, we're in this crazy period of time where a lot of people are going to be making a lot of money. And so with these conversations, I've been trying to get down to, okay, what do you do once you have that wealth? How do you manage it? And one of the topics in the conversation on wealth management is private aviation. So I'm really excited to talk about this today. And I'm just really curious. So are we seeing more private jets? What's the state of the market?

**Israel Slodowitz** (2:49)
Yeah, so it's like you said, it's absolutely insane what's going on right now. We're sitting here on a Sunday. SpaceX is supposed to IPO this Thursday. So some of our clients and a lot of our investors are going to be in New York for this iconic IPO. Probably the largest IPO by twice as much as the last one. And this is just the first of many, right? OpenAI just announced that they're going to be going public. And we're seeing like not just an insane wealth creation moment, probably the largest we've seen in the history of humankind, but we're also seeing a shift in how people spend their wealth and their priorities. And also the type of wealth that they are generating. It's not the same wealth that was generated historically, where people kind of built a business over many, many years and they slowly diversified.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:43)
New money.

**Israel Slodowitz** (3:44)
It's just like completely new money.
So there's like this massive tsunami that's hitting. And we're seeing it in our business. We're seeing it in the preferences of what people are choosing, how they're accessing private aviation. And of course, the most sought after thing, once you make some money, is to start flying private. It's like the one thing everybody looks to do.
It's truly a unique tool that nothing else replaces.

**Molly O'Shea** (4:09)
So how is that changing who's buying jets versus who's chartering them? What is the difference?

**Israel Slodowitz** (4:14)
First of all, we're seeing people entering the market buying bigger airplanes. So this airplane, for example, this is a Challenger 350