Elon Musk’s private jet flew 355 flights in 2024, data from jet tracking company JetSpy shows. The jet’s flight signals the billionaire’s growing political involvement. More than half of the jet’s flights since Nov. 5 have departed from and arrived at the nearby Palm Beach area. Mar-a-Lago.
Elon Musk has had a busy year. He introduced Tesla’s robotaxis, his net worth is over $400 billion, and he became President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy.”
His private jet also took about 881 hours to traverse the globe.
To uncover how the world’s richest man spent his time in 2024, Business Insider charted Musk’s private jet travel using jet tracking service JetSpy.
All told, Musk’s two Gulfstream private jets made 355 flights between January and mid-December of this year.
This data helps reveal how extensively Musk has penetrated Trumpworld, and along with his upcoming advisory roles and multimillion-dollar donations to the new White House, Musk’s It provides a new window into growing political engagement.
Musk did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
The jet trip may have been an early clue that the billionaire was getting closer to President Trump.
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On February 17, one of Mr. Musk’s planes made its first flight of the year to Palm Beach International Airport, about eight miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion. Three months later, the Wall Street Journal first reported that Trump and Musk had discussed a possible advisory role if the former president was re-elected.
Musk’s jet made a total of 31 flights to and from Palm Beach International Airport in 2024.
It is unclear whether Musk was on board each of the flights tracked. It is also unclear whether he may have traveled to the Palm Beach, Florida, area for any reason other than meeting with President Trump. Of the 31 flights in the Palm Beach area, 25 were after Trump won the election. Other flights took place between February and March. More than half of the jet’s trips since Nov. 5 involved flights to and from the region.
Musk has been photographed with Trump several times at Mar-a-Lago, including at Thanksgiving dinner.
After Musk publicly endorsed Trump, his jet made 13 trips to and from battleground states, including various cities in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The Tesla CEO’s plane also made 10 trips to and from an airport near Washington, D.C.
Of the 355 total flights, 54 were to and from the Palm Beach area, Washington state and battleground states. By comparison, in 2023, his jet made 16 trips to and from airports near Washington.
President Trump proposed making Musk co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Brandon Bell/Pool (via AP)
In 2022, Musk began using a federal program that allows private jet owners to disguise their travel with temporary aircraft registration numbers, and his jets have used the service intermittently ever since.
According to JetSpy, Musk’s aircraft used a “privacy ICAO address” on 17 flights this year. On election night, I flew to West Palm Beach using PIA. The service was adopted in June on several flights to and from Memphis Airport, near Musk’s xAI startup’s data center, a facility the city announced that month. (JetSpy does not rely solely on Federal Aviation Administration data. enable (used to track flights using PIA).
Besides political travel, the plane’s main destinations in 2024 included airports in Hawthorne, Calif., and Brownsville, Texas, both near SpaceX’s hubs. They also frequently flew to the Austin airport, near Tesla’s headquarters and Musk’s home.
The aircraft also flew overseas to France, Poland, Germany, Portugal, Indonesia, China, and the United Kingdom. Musk visited Paris for the Olympics and the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, as well as Bali for the Starlink launch.
The two planes used about $2.5 million worth of fuel and emitted about 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024, according to JetSpy data. According to the International Energy Agency, that’s about 250 times the lifetime emissions of the average person in the United States.
The longest recorded flight between Musk’s two jets was a 10-hour flight from Seattle to Tokyo in May. Mr. Musk’s plane also made several rapid flights, including nine flights of less than 10 minutes, although some of these were likely the result of the pilot changing the position of the aircraft. The average flight time for the two aircraft was about two hours.
Still, despite his world travels, 2024 was a relatively quiet year. Last year, the plane flew 456 times.
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