Most people reading this are probably very familiar with buying things between $0-1000 USD (such as everyday food and everyday clothing, perhaps weekly rent). Some of us will have experience buying more expensive items, like a car ($10,000s), or maybe even a house ($100,000s or even $1,000,000s). Some of you might want to object to those numbers I listed, they obviously will vary wildly in different markets, but I want to now ask about much more expensive things.
What is the cost of some items that few-if-any Lemmy users can afford? What can the absurdly rich buy that we can’t? How much does it cost them?
You must give a money value with some evidence, no just knee-jerking and saying something vague like “elections” - instead find articles disclosing how much manipulation campaigns cost a political party.
Private jet aircraft. They are very expensive to buy (say from US$ 5 to 70 million), but also shockingly expensive to operate. It’s hard to put an exact number to operation costs since it’s a mix of fixed and variable costs, but a fancy jet like a G650 is likely gonna be a few million a year in op costs (fuel, maintenance, management, crew salaries. training, hangar fees, facility fees, and so on. Also, few people actually buy aircraft directly. Rather they pay a management company to set up an ownership entity that owns and manages the aircraft for you.
It’s tempting to think of a jet as a vehicle, but really it’s more like paying people to do all the work and waiting for you so that the time you spend waiting is as minimal as possible. When most people fly, you buy a ticket, you book a ride to the airport, you go through security, customs, immigration, ticketing, baggage handling, and so on. Then you wait to board, wait for everyone else to board, wait for other planes to take off, maybe fly to a hub location enroute to your destination, and so on. If you’re in a plane like a G650, you pay other people to do all of this for you so that you can show up to a plane that’s fueled and ready to go, with the cabin AC at the temp you like, and your cocktail already poured sitting at the table by your seat. You get in, they start the roll.
It’s lavish, opulent, and wasteful in the extreme, but still a damn nice way to travel.
If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.
Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.
At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).
At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.