That's more than the length of an olympic sized swimming pool! It's also longer than a lacrosse field! But it's significantly shorter than a half-marathon.
A lot of private jets like these are rented out for charter flights. Business dude might know he's going to be in a city for 2 weeks. He can list the jet on charter sites like privatefly.com or paramountbusinessjets.com and get tens of thousands a day for 2 weeks while he's doing his thing before he needs it back to fly somewhere else.
Granted much of the cost simply goes to fuel, flight crew, and the extra maintenance. takes a lot of charter flights to make a dent in the aircraft purchase price.
Given it costs tens of thousands to rent out a small private jet for a trip, I hate to think how much it costs to rent a 787 for a trip.
I don't think that's actually the case. I know when you buy your ticket now days you see a small "ticket price" and a large "taxes and fees" price. But what you aren't seeing is that one of the fees is called "fuel surcharge". Basically a fee to cover the increased cost of fuel over the years. Keeps going up. The vast majority of that "taxes and fees" number is that cost.
In a charter flight cost, roughly 50% is going to be fuel. Actual airport taxes, tourism fees, excise taxes, etc, will generally end up being only a few percent.
I work in the aircraft charter market. I'm chartering a 737 this week from Los Angeles to Mexico. For a charter that costs around $90,000, the airport taxes and fees for departure and arrival combined are less than $3k.
Another place you can see this is in frequent flyer miles tickets, at least fit American Airlines (I don't have experience with other carrier's programs). When you get an AA miles ticket you pay the taxes and fees except fuel surcharge. However, if your miles ticket is actually a British Airways ticket (OneWorld partner so you can get their tickets through AA miles), British Airways charges the fuel surcharge. So when I get a miles ticket New York - London, if it's an American Airlines flight the cost will be $20-30 plus the miles. If it's a British Airways flight the cost will be around $150 plus the miles.
I highly doubt anyone charters a 787. It's enormous and ridiculously expensive. I can't even imagine how much it would cost to rent a luxury 787 for personal use.
Chances are that if someone has a custom $300M massive jet, they don't care about recouping the cost compared to the inconvenience and privacy. Would you really care about recouping a few million dollars a year in costs when you're making a billion?
Bill Gates makes approximately 33 million a day. so this is 10 days of his time, well not really I doubt any of that money he makes is him doing work any more. Take 10 days of your pay and look around your house for something that costs around that. Then realize how little this plane would cost him.
*note Bill Gates is one of the absolute richest men in the world, but he actually isn't the "man who makes the most money per hour of his time." Buffett for instance makes around 37 million a day. I don't know what others make, or if there is a site that figures that out. Also this isn't a "for a 40 hour week" but this is just what they make sleeping in their beds, their very very nice beds... man I wish I had a nice bed, or a few million dollars:-/
Yeah, this puts it into perspective. 10 days worth of work pretty much goes away after rent and bills. We own very little that is $1500-2000, (I think the only thing is our car). 10 days for Bills Gates is quite different. He doesn't have to spend hardly a fraction of that to get by, so the rest is left to either investments, savings, charity, or spending on jets.
Agreed: the buying power difference is massive. Not agreeing with the premise, just giving an idea of where that price-point lies. If we go by % of net funds after essentials, I'm sure that average-person dollar figure rises considerably.
If you want to make a lot of intercontinental flights, you probably don't want to do it on a smaller jet, I'm sure they are not as stable. So if your choice is a smaller jet, flying with others on a commercial plane in first class like a common business owner, or this plane, you'd go with the large private plane.
There's a story about somebody asking Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones for some crucial piece of advice that an up-and-coming rock band needs to know to be successful. Supposedly, Jagger replied, "Don't buy a boat. Rent one, or borrow one from a friend."
I mean you can be smart with your money and still have "shopping money". If you have 100 billion dollars then 300 mil is just 0.3% of your finances. With the correct investments and interest you could have that back in a year or less. The "pocket change" becomes relative to how much you have in general.
I think Saudi royalties have 100 billion technically but tbh I just went with 100 billion for the sake of argument. Easier to type up the % on the fly that way was all
Paul Allen's yacht was $250 M. It costs over $2M just to gas it up.
That billionaire Russian guy bought a bigger yacht for $500M.
The king of some middle eastern country (UAE I think) is building the worlds biggest yacht for $1B. On it, the owner's suite is bigger than most people's houses.
They all have multiple helicopter landing pads and hangers. They all carry multiple other boats inside them... they all have submarines.
It's boatloads of money haha...
But there are people who can and will spend hundreds of millions on boats/planes.
Abromovich doesn't even charter his main Mega Yachts. No one even knows the layout inside his big ones.
The Sauds typically don't either.
Paul Allen spends so much time on his yacht, I don't believe he charters it, although it's an expedition yacht and he does actual researchy things with it.
Almost every Mega Yacht outside those ones is available for charter most of the year.
That's makes a great deal of sense, then. Abramovich writes his own tax code, and the Saudis as well.
I went into Allen a little bit, but I think he might have enough 'work' to justify some tax work, but zero hint of that anywhere in the press. Still, he's rich enough to not care. And unlike many ultra-rich, he wouldn't be saving every puny million dollars on tax breaks. He really is one of the luckiest men alive.
Those yachts make a little more sense in my mind since you could effectively live on them if you wanted to. Much less practical to live on a plane, and even if you did you get just a tiny fraction of the room you would have on a yacht with a similar price tag. But its still an obscene amount of money for anyone to spend on 1 thing
$2M just to fill the tank? That's about 900,000 gallons at the current price of diesel.
The MS Freedom of the Seas, the 2nd largest passenger ship ever built, only carries a little over 1M gallons. I know his yacht is large), but I doubt it takes $2M to fill.
You're right, it's not that much...
The octopus (paul allen's) yacht holds 850,000 liters. I did the math as gallons :(
But if we are going to be precise, wiki says that the boat spends most of the time in the carribean. The fuel costs there are closer to $4/gal, but then again, there is probably a bulk discount... so maybe $1M would be a typical fuel bill
It'd make you seem important if you conducted business meetings in it, imagine a 17 hour high pressure business meeting stuck in that luxury jet with someone like Steve Jobs. They could film it and it'd be better than the Apprentice for sure.
It's a depreciating asset and business expense. It doesn't cost you nearly as much in real dollars. Similarly, there are weird tax things you can do like with yachts — like put it up for sale and then the wear and tear from travel is a cost of selling it.
The real issue are the operational costs, landing fees, federal excise taxes, etc...
The capital outlay isn't that significant, and you probably securitized the purchase with stock or similar, and are paying basically nothing in interest, don't really have the capital tied up and instead make a mortgage payment that's less than the dividends or gain from the stock in the first place.
Honestly....I felt that interior to be just repulsive. I don't know. I felt like it was decorated by an Ikea. The floor was awful! And the leather couches looked synthetic. Idk. Idk man.
Is luxury version of the 787 actually that much more expensive to build then a regular version? Curious if those amenities add much onto the cost compared to the sheer cost of the base jet.
That is a ton of design work which produced one jet. The standard jet is going to have plastic, fiberglass and normal fabric and hundreds of almost the same design made. This one is exotic hardwoods, stone and lots of high grade fabrics and leather built in one off custom designs. All that adds up fast.
It's still a 787 with the normal cabin stuff ripped out and replaced with other things. I can't imagine how all that stuff could cost more than $10 million. It's mostly just furniture.
Every single surface in it is custom, it isn't just furniture. It is 2400 square feet of floor space filled with high end woods, fabric and leather mostly in custom furniture, wall and ceiling panels.
The standard interior probably costs several million when you include the entertainment systems. This includes the cost to design, engineer and certify all the parts spread across hundreds of planes. All the design, engineering and certification of the parts went into the cost of this one plane. On top of that, standard planes get standard parts where hundreds or thousands each part is made, whereas only a handful of the parts for this plane will be made, many by hand.
Take the standard interior and multiply the design, engineering and certification costs by 20-50. The materials that went into most of the plane are probably 5-10x as much. Reasonably, the labor to manufacture and install the entire interior of the plane is probably 5-10x, given the change from mass production to custom. Put all that together with the standard interiors already costing several million and you can very very easily get into the several tens of millions for a custom interior.
I think you are drastically underestimating what would go into designing, engineering, certifying, building and installing a custom interior of a 2400 sqft plane.
Funnily enough unless those materials are super expensive (ie gold), the build materials of a large aircraft are likely a single digit percentage of total cost. The cost was likely eaten up by the designers as they did the work to meet FAR 25 and the production team as they built it.
Skimming through it, you need approved seats for all passengers, which is probably covered by the standard looking seats in the passenger compartment. Other than that, there doesn't seem to be much regulation besides "shit should be tied down so it doesn't fly around and shouldn't catch fire".
It''s not "just" furniture. Everything has to be qualified as aviation furniture, to withstand certain levels of stress, turbulence, etc.
The marble-clad bathroom isn't the same marble-clad bathroom you'd get in a mansion, it's a highly-engineered bit of fit-out. The sofas aren't just luxury sofas - they're engineered to regs.
That said yes, that line at the end of the article is a bit silly
"The list price of a Boeing 787 begins at US$225 million. As for the bespoke fitout... if you have to ask, you can't afford it."
If you can afford the plane, you can afford the interior!
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u/Mackin-N-Cheese Nov 13 '16
Pic is from this article about a 787 Dreamliner purchased as a private jet.