A year of Elon Musk's private jet travels reveals his deepening political ties
Allison Robbert-Pool/Getty Images; Chelsea Jia Feng/BI
- Elon Musk's private jets made 355 flights in 2024, data from jet-tracking company JetSpy shows.
- The jets' travel shows the billionaire's growing political involvement.
- Over half the jets' trips since November 5 have been to or from the Palm Beach area, near Mar-a-Lago.
Elon Musk has had a busy year. He unveiled Tesla's robotaxi, his net worth surpassed $400 billion, and he became President-elect Donald Trump's "first buddy."
His private jets also spent about 881 hours crisscrossing the globe.
To help shed light on how the world's wealthiest man spent his time in 2024, Business Insider charted Musk's private jets' travel using the jet-tracking service JetSpy.
All told, Musk's two Gulfstream private jets made 355 flights between January and mid-December this year.
The data helps reveal how extensively Musk has burrowed into Trumpworld and, alongside his coming advisory role to the new White House and millions of dollars in donations, provides another window into his growing political involvement.
Musk did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The jet travel may have been an early clue that the billionaire was growing closer to Trump.
On February 17, one of Musk's planes took its first flight of the year to Palm Beach International Airport — about 5 miles from Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago. Three months later, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that Trump and Musk had talked about a potential advisory role in the event the former president won reelection.
In total, Musk's jets made 31 flights to or from Palm Beach International Airport in 2024.
It's unclear whether Musk was on each flight tracked. It's also unclear whether he might have visited the Palm Beach, Florida, area for reasons other than a meeting with Trump. Twenty-five of the 31 Palm Beach-area flights were after Trump's election victory. The other flights took place between February and March. More than half the jets' trips since November 5 have involved flying to or from the area.
Musk has been photographed several times alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago, including at a Thanksgiving dinner.
Following Musk's official endorsement of Trump, his jets also made 13 trips to and from swing states, including various cities across Pennsylvania and Georgia. The Tesla CEO's planes also made ten trips to and from an airport near Washington, DC.
In total, 54 of the 355 flights involved travel to and from the Palm Beach area, Washington, and swing states. In 2023, by comparison, his jets traveled to and from an airport near Washington 16 times.
Brandon Bell/Pool via AP
In 2022, Musk began using a federal program that allows private jet owners to cloak their travels with a temporary aircraft-registration number, and his jets have used the service on and off since then.
This year, Musk's aircraft used a "privacy ICAO address" for 17 flights, according to JetSpy. On election night, a PIA was used to fly to West Palm Beach. The service was employed for several flights in June to and from a Memphis airport near a data center for Musk's xAI startup, a facility the city announced that same month. (JetSpy doesn't rely solely on Federal Aviation Administration data, which enables it to track flights that use PIA.)
Besides politics-related travel, the planes' top destinations in 2024 included airports in Hawthorne, California, and Brownsville, Texas, which are both near SpaceX sites. They also frequently flew to an airport in Austin near Tesla's headquarters and one of Musk's homes.
The planes also flew overseas to France, Poland, Germany, Portugal, Indonesia, China, and the UK. Musk visited Paris for the Olympics and Notre-Dame's reopening, as well as Bali for a Starlink launch.
The two jets used about $2.5 million worth of fuel and emitted nearly 4,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, according to the JetSpy data. Per the International Energy Agency, that's about 250 times what the average person in the US emits over their lifetime.
The longest flight recorded between Musk's two jets was 10 hours, from Seattle to Tokyo, in May. Musk's planes also took several quick flights, including nine flights that lasted less than 10 minutes, though some of these were likely the result of the pilot repositioning the aircraft. The average flight time for the two aircraft was about two hours.
Still, despite his global travels, 2024 was comparatively sedate — last year, the planes logged 456 flights.
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