Brief Comments on the Private Jet

Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. I’ve just returned from Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I had a lovely time with the governor and other state officials discussing the new Wyoming stablecoin law that they’ve passed. I attended the first public hearing on May 8th to discuss how Wyoming is going to build a stablecoin. It’s a very exciting time, and I’ll make videos about that later when things are a bit more mature. They have to move quickly because, apparently, the government by law has to issue something by December, so we’ll see what they do there.

I wanted to make a video quickly to talk about something that’s been circulating around the internet. It has reached the point where there’s a dedicated website for it, and people are commenting on the notion of owning and using a private aircraft. The backstory is that a 17-year-old in Seattle decided to take public data and pull it into a website to show the carbon output of celebrities, billionaires, and other important people for their use of private aircraft. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Cuban are on the list, but I am also listed in the top 15. What I wanted to do is provide a little clarity on the economics of private jets because the website is actually overcounting their use.

Most people who own an aircraft, if it’s a sufficiently good aircraft, work with a third-party company to charter that aircraft to others. That’s exactly what I do. When I’m not using my private aircraft for business, I have a company take care of finding clients to use it regularly. I have a pretty broad range of clients, from Metallica to The Rock and others. It’s a great networking tool because, as you can imagine, those people are obviously people I do business with and know.

It’s a great way to get to places quickly without jet lag, and it’s also a great tool for business. In my entire life, I’ve never met someone who, when trying to get somewhere, would say no to coming on the jet. You can have heads of state, celebrities, and others that you’d want to have some form of relationship with in a business context. There is a large movement, the ESG movement, pushing to reduce carbon. The great irony is that when you look at the list that was aggregated, the vast majority of those individuals are big boosters of the ESG movement, for example, Bill Gates and others of his ilk.

They talk about how we have to reduce carbon; it’s the most important thing in the world, more important than anything else. Now, whether you’re in that group or not, that’s not the point of this conversation. The point is that because of this, people are starting to be very serious about measuring things, almost the Catholic Church during the Crusades selling indulgences in the form of carbon credits to try to forgive those who use a lot more carbon. My personal consumption is probably pretty high, not just because I have a jet, but I also have a large ranch in Wyoming with 500 bison. If you look at the emissions of cattle, bison actually produce more because they’re larger and eat the same things, digesting them in the same way.

Each person tends to have a significant carbon output. I want a clean, healthy world, and I believe the best way to achieve that is to be smarter about energy policy. For example, if we upgraded our current coal plants, we could dramatically reduce their emissions. Additionally, with waste fly ash, we could convert that into geopolymer concrete. The number one substance for climate pollution is not coal or oil or driving a car; it’s concrete production.

You can look it up; it’s one of the most commonly used substances and is incredibly energy-intensive to produce Portland cement. If you have geopolymer concrete with waste materials like fly ash, in some cases, you can achieve a 90% reduction in carbon, which would be more than every plane and car combined. We could have low-emission coal use, utilize waste products to make concrete, and suddenly we’ve massively reduced our problems. It’s base load, very cheap, and creates a nice bridge for us to invent better technologies like fusion, improvements in geothermal, as well as advancements in wind, solar, and other renewables. We can’t even have that conversation because there’s a militant group of people who seem to think that the only option is a very narrow set of power generation that requires batteries, which are incredibly environmentally wasteful and tend not to be recycled as much as we’d like to admit.

In some cases, the source materials come from child labor. We can ignore all of that as long as we adhere to this other thing. We can certainly have the debate, but the problem is that carbon policy is just not well thought out. For my part, I own a bioluminescent plant company, and we’re making amazing progress in making plants glow in the dark. Probably sometime this year, we’ll have something very bright and exciting, maybe with a circadian rhythm and a whole bunch of other features, so look for that announcement.

One of the things I’m really researching is finding a way to make these plants sequester large amounts of carbon. That’s probably the solution—not destroying the entire economy of the world and pushing us toward intermittent power and radical scarcity, but using technology to solve the problems of technology. If you can just plant something that sequesters enormous amounts of carbon and create a company where people have a strong incentive to do that, suddenly you go from carbon positive to carbon negative very quickly. It’s in a safer way; it’s sequestered in plants, part of the biome, and part of the life cycle on Earth. It’s a complicated issue, and unfortunately, people don’t like complicated issues anymore.

At a certain point in business, you go private because you can get places faster. You’re not delayed because of COVID. The airlines have been hammered, and their fidelity and schedules are just absolutely terrible. Many of my friends have missed important meetings because of flight delays, lost luggage, or other problems. By flying privately, you eliminate all of that.

You can get everywhere quickly. For example, if I were to fly commercially to Burundi, it would take over 30 hours to get there from where I was, but it’s a two-and-a-half-hour direct flight with a jet. The great irony of all this is that it’s actually one of the best business investments I ever made. I make a profit on it because of the charter business, so it doesn’t cost anything to operate. You get places quickly, and you can use it to network with remarkable people.

Yet, you end up on the list that a 17-year-old writes, which doesn’t even have accurate numbers. The 353 flights last year—probably more than half were charters, if not more—and yet it gets counted towards me. In fact, someone tracking it on Twitter said, “Look, he’s flying to the Bahamas.” I wish I was in the Bahamas! I was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, yesterday for a very public meeting.

Why? Because somebody’s chartering it there, and they follow it. That’s the nature of the world. I’ve always been transparent and honest with you guys, while a lot of people hide these things. It’s a great shame we can’t talk about it.

I don’t brag about it, but I’m more than happy to have a discussion whenever it comes up about the things I do and the places I go. I try to be as transparent as possible, so I hope that addresses some of the comments, questions, and concerns. It’s a complicated issue, the whole climate thing. We’re all just kind of working on it together. For me, the practical solutions don’t seem to be what people care about.

They just want to do extreme things and then complain when others don’t get on board with their ideas. That’s the problem with the world today; it’s very polarized, and everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too. Until next time, have a wonderful day. Cheers!