Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Frank Robert

Author:Frank, Robert [Frank, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Crown Business
Published: 2008-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

Jets: Reaching Escape Velocity

In 2006 Eric Roth got an unusual request. The head of International Jet Interiors, a New Jersey–based company that outfits private-jet cabins, got a call from a client who had just purchased a Challenger 604. The client wanted something special. Especially for the toilet.

“He asked if I could make a potty seat from alligator skin,” Roth recalls. “I said, ‘You bet I can!’”

Roth bought two alligator skins from a dealer in Florida for $8,000 and carefully stitched them into toilet seats and trim for the cabin interior. He also installed a handwoven carpet from Thailand, made from wool and silk, with 14 colors, at $600 a yard. He used rose gold, with a “swirled funnel finish,” to make the cabin's doorknobs, seat-belt buckles and other fixtures, and he dyed the leather seats the same pinkish hue to match. The cupboards were stocked with Versace china, Christofle silver and Lalique crystal.

“Now that was a nice plane,” he says.

For some private-jet owners, the world seems to rest on whether they have the proper wood grain on their cabin finish. One of Roth's customers was a woman who owned a Gulfstream IV and insisted on picking out the exact log that would be used to make her interior moldings.

She flew Roth in her jet to a specialty-wood warehouse in Indiana, where they spent eight hours picking through stacks of lumber. Finally she found the perfect piece—a satiny burr madrona. The trip cost $30,000, not including the wood.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were more pragmatic about their choice in private jets. The 30-something multibillionaires, who drive environmentally friendly hybrid cars, bought a Boeing 767 wide-body airliner to fly themselves and their friends around the world. The jet, originally designed to hold 224 passengers, was to be retrofitted for a maximum of 50 people.

When asked why they needed such a huge plane, Larry said they were motivated by practical concerns. The plane, after all, probably cost under $15 million—one-third the price of a much smaller Gulfstream 550.

“We tend to have an engineering approach, to be factbased,” Page told The Wall Street Journal. “We looked at this and we just did the economics and we said ‘you know it makes a lot of sense.’”

Such pragmatic extravagance didn't seem to apply to the plane's interior. Among other amenities, the Google guys wanted hammocks hung from the ceiling. Sergey and Larry bickered over whether they could both have California king–size beds onboard. And at one point during the renovation, according to the designer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “It's a party airplane.”

Still, Brin insisted that the private wide-body is fully in keeping with Google's mission to improve the world.

“Part of the equation for this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa,” Page told The Wall Street Journal. “I think that can only be good for the world.”

Sales of private jets are skyrocketing. Purchases of new private jets totaled $13 billion in 2005, up from $3.

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