Elon Musk A Frequent Flier In 2022 With Flights Lasting As Little As 13 Minutes, Says Report: His Love For Jet-Setting At Odds With Tesla's Climate Stance?

Tesla Inc. TELA CEO Elon Musk is an entrepreneur who has his fingers in many pies, and undoubtedly time is money for him.

What Happened: Musk has the privilege of using his private jet that helps him go globetrotting as well as commuting to offices or factories of the five ventures he runs. His business ventures include Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Neuralink and Twitter.

Of late, his flights have been far from being “few and far between,” and have gotten more frequent in recent months, reported Bloomberg.

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Some of the trips that he took in 2022 include:

• A visit to Hawaii in January to meet up with Oracle co-founder and friend Larry Ellison.
• Found around the Berlin club scene in early April.
• Attended a TED event in Vancouver in April.
• Visited Brazil’s then-President Jair Bolsonaro in May.
• Met the Pope in Rome in July.

This apart, Musk was undertaking frequent, sometimes even daily trips, to the headquarters of Tesla in Austin or SpaceX near Los Angeles, Bloomberg reported. After his Twitter buy in October 2022, he has been flying frequently to and from Bay Area, it added.

Musk’s jet flew around the earth about 12.4 times in 2022, Bloomberg said. Data shared by the media outlet also showed that Musk led among the rest of the billionaires in the number of flights undertaken in 2022.

The Tesla CEO flew 171 times in his private jet compared to 115 by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and 85 by Alphabet-owned Google’s cofounders Sergey Brin/Larry Page.

Several trips he undertook in 2022 were very brief lasting 15 minutes or less, Bloomberg said. The billionaire reportedly took a 13-minute flight from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthrone, California, to the Los Angeles International Airport, which is less than six miles away, before taking off to Nice, France.

The report also noted that Musk’s jet once left Austin, Texas, to Sacramento, where one of Twitter’s data center is located, and returned to Austin about 24 minutes later.

Why It’s Important: Musk’s frequent flights make two moot points — the demands placed on him due to his stewarding five companies and the impact that flights can have on climate change.

The flight on the billionaire’s private jet emitted about 2,112 metric tons of greenhouse gas in 2022, Bloomberg noted. This, according to the report, is about 140 times more than the Average American’s carbon footprint. All the same, it is only a fraction of the 8.4 million metric tons that Tesla estimates that its customers avoided emitting in 2021.

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