Billionaires do appear to like the liberty of the skies, particularly once they’re not crammed in with all of the riff raff on any public flight. Though on the similar time, the uber wealthy don’t take pleasure in different individuals criticizing them for routinely taking brief jaunts on personal jets whereas producing lots of of tons of CO2 within the course of.

Bernard Arnault, the CEO of luxurious model LVMH—recognized for costly labels like Louis Vuitton—is the world’s second-richest man in accordance with Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. He at present clocks in at a web price of $133 billion, beating out Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ paltry $130 billion. He’s additionally been harangued on Twitter for his constant use of personal jets. French accounts that use planes’ transponder alerts and publicly accessible info have tracked Arnault’s and different wealthy people’ use of personal jets to disclose simply how a lot wasteful flying time is utilized by the world’s wealthiest.

In September, the Twitter account laviodebernard (Bernard’s Plane) wrote that Arnault’s airplane had been de-registered in France. The account wrote “The LVMH private jet has not been registered in France since September 1, 2022. Still no word from Bernard Arnault or LVMH on the subject of private jets. So Bernard, are we hiding?”

Apparently, that’s simply what Arnault has been doing. On the LVMH-owned podcast launched Monday, Arnault admitted that the LVMH group “had a plane, and we sold it.” He added: “The result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes.”

LVMH didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for remark. The matter of taxing the nation’s richest for utilizing personal jets has been seen favorably by French lawmakers and a few officials like environmental minister Christophe Bechu.

Antoine Arnault, the second scion of the world’s second richest man, a LVMH board member and director of communications for Louis Vuitton, additionally stated through the podcast that different individuals realizing the place their firm jet is might give opponents an edge. He additionally informed French news channel 5’s à Vous final week “This plane is a work tool.” As translated by Bloomberg, the youthful Arnault added that the corporate offered the airplane over the summer time.

Of course, the problem doesn’t simply should do with Arnault alone. Another considered one of these crucial Twitter accounts I Fly Bernard just lately identified that millionaires’ personal planes coming from France have emitted 203 tons of CO2 into the environment by over 48 hours of flights in September alone. On Sept. 18 the account pointed out that the French businessman and CEO of Kering François-Henri Pinault, flew from Venice to Paris, then again to Venice all in sooner or later, cheekily writing “maybe a forgotten phone charger at the hotel?”

The world richest man, Elon Musk, additionally has a penchant for utilizing his personal airplane fairly an obscene quantity. Earlier this yr, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO got here below fireplace when transponder alerts confirmed he had flown his $70 million personal Gulfstream jet simply 9 minutes from San Jose to San Francisco.

The billionaire reportedly proposed to purchase one of many accounts monitoring his jet, known as @ElonJet. Musk requested Jack Sweeney, the younger man who runs the bot-tracking Twitter account, to take down the account calling it a “security risk.” He even provided to purchase the account for a measly $5,000, in accordance with Twitter DMs seen by Protocol. Sweeney requested Musk so as to add “an extra ‘0’” to that quantity, however to today, the monitoring account stays.