Featured Image Credit: Credit: Alessandra Benedetti - Corbis / Contributor / JADE GAO / Contributor / Getty
Billionaire and owner of six companies Elon Musk spent a fair few hours in the sky this year, it has been reported.
Musk’s private planes - yes, plural - took flight 441 times in the past year, according to new data gathered by the jet-tracking site JetSpy as of mid-December.
His aircraft were in the sky for more than 1,161 hours in 2023, which is the equivalent of over 48 days spent flying, according to JetSpy data published by Business Insider.
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The businessman and owner of major companies including Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly Twitter, owns two Gulfstream private jets.
The average flight time for these two aircrafts was about two and a half hours in 2023, Business Insider reported.
Among the most popular destinations for Musk’s private planes were reportedly airports in Los Angeles, California, Hawthorne, California, where Space X is headquartered, and Brownsville, Texas, near SpaceX's launch site and the state in which Tesla’s headquarters are located.
The longest flight Musk took in 2023 was an almost 13-hour flight to Tokyo in August.
The billionaire took some quick trips lasting between 11 and 15 minutes between Hawthorne and Los Angeles earlier in the year, which are less than 10 miles apart, the data showed.
Musk’s most recent international flight was a trip to Israel in December, when he met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and visited a kibbutz that had been attacked by Hamas.
A third plane was registered to Musk’s spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX in September 2021, which Business Insider didn’t include in the billionaire’s total flying time as it's not registered to him.
That plane took to the skies 246 times since mid December, racking up about 630 hours of flight time, per JetSpy data.
In addition to two private planes, Musk also reportedly flew a Gulfstream G700 business jet and at one time owned a Dassault Falcon 900B, Business Insider reported.
Musk’s travel comes with a steep cost to the environment with his planes emitting an estimated 5,159 metric tons of CO2 in 2023, according to JetSpy.
Additionally, his planes reportedly consumed 538,957 gallons of fuel this past year, racking up a cost of a whopping $3.2 million to fuel the planes, JetSpy data is believed to have shown.
Musk’s longest ranged plane is the G650ER, which Gulfstream says holds the record for the farthest fastest flight in business aviation history.
The spacious interior of the plane is kitted out with divan and single seats that convert to beds, with space to seat up to 19 passengers and bedding for 10.
JetSpy collects its data using ADS-B data that is transmitted from several vendors and networks.
