Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, said on Radio Classique that the luxury goods company sold its private jet after individuals attempted to track the aircraft on social media.
The world’s second-richest man has had enough of the Twitterverse tracking his every move in his private plane. He said that he had started renting private planes for his trips.
Twitter radar
According to reports, multiple Twitter accounts that track and reveal available flight data have sprung up over the past year, disclosing the travel activity of people, including Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
Two top accounts that tracked the flights of French billionaire are I Fly Bernard and Bernard’s Airplane (@i_fly_Bernard and @laviondebernard). The accounts, created over the past six months, have a combined following of nearly 1,00,000.
Arnault appears to have made the switch to renting jets several weeks ago. In September, Bernard’s Airplane tweeted about the billionaire’s lack of recent flight data after noting several weeks earlier that LVMH had de-registered its plane in France.
The tweet read, “Still no word from either Bernard Arnault or LVMH on the subject of private jets. So Bernard, are you hiding?”
Arnault said on the LVMH-owned radio station, “The result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes.”
His son, Antoine Arnault said, “It’s not very good that our competitors can know where we are at any moment. That can give ideas, it can also give leads, clues.”
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Arnault has a net worth of almost $133 billion, surpassing Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the world’s second-richest man.