The world’s third-richest man Bernard Arnault has sold his private jet to escape Twitter activists from tracking the billionaire’s movement. Arnault is the CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton SE, the world's largest luxury goods company. He said the company took the decision to sell the jet to keep his movement a secret, according to a Bloomberg report.
The billionaire’s company sold its private jet as several social media accounts on Twitter started tracing his flights to tally his carbon emissions to campaign against the use of private jets.
Multiple Twitter accounts have sprung up over the past year that tracks and share publicly available flight data to publicise the travel activity of the rich such as Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
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Two of the top accounts that track the Louis Vuitton co-founder are @i_fly_Bernard and @laviondebernard, which were created over the past six months, and have a combined following of nearly 100,000.
“Indeed, with all these stories, the group had a plane and we sold it,” Arnault said on Radio Classique, the LVMH-owned radio station, according to the Bloomberg report. “The result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes,” he added.
Arnault has a net worth of almost $134 billion, and he is placed after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the third-richest man in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The French parliament has also been discussing the pollution created by private jets with politicians asking for a ban or tax on the use of private jets.
However, his son Antoine Arnault, defended the use of private jets on a television show saying that a plane is a work tool that provides the company with an edge in the highly competitive industry as per the report.
In the radio interview, the father-son duo also mentioned that it is not good for the company if their competitors know where they are at any moment, thus this is another reason for keeping the company’s travels secret.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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