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- Billionaire Palmer Luckey on on why he only flies coach
Billionaire Palmer Luckey on on why he only flies coach
“I don’t fly private and do fly coach,” billionaire founder of Anduril and Oculus Palmer Luckey says. “For me, it’s a reasoned thing. With exceptions for long, international travel, we only cover coach travel for our employees — it’s only a few hours, and it’s a very bad use of company money for us to be buying business or first-class for people. Because we have so much travel at the company, we could easily spend a very serious fraction of our resources on people traveling instead of slightly better seats.”
To lead by example, Palmer will fly coach — even when he uses his own money:
“People say, ‘Well, why don’t you just fly first-class?’ And here’s why: if I’m going to ask my employees to do it, I need to do it too — even when it’s my own money. It’s not that I would appear out of touch, I would literally be out of touch. Maybe one day coach gets so bad that I literally tell everyone, ‘I hear you, we’re all going business now.’ But today is not that day.”
He continues:
“I love the back of the plain by the window. Nobody bothers you. You can let everyone get off the plane before you. You don’t have to fight anybody . . . And my grandpa was a pilot for United Airlines for over 40 years. So I also grew up around commercial airlines and to me there is a certain romanticism to mass-market, mass-available air travel. What an incredible thing. And we did it — America did it! We figured out how to make it economically viable, and we build everyone else’s airplanes. It is an American thing.”