The $65 Million Perk for CEOs: Personal Use of the Corporate Jet Has Soared
Company spending on the benefit has climbed 50% since before the pandemic
5 min
One of the flashiest executive perks has roared back since the onset of the pandemic: free personal travel on the company jet.
Companies in the S&P 500 spent $65 million for executives to use corporate jets for personal travel in 2022, up about 50% from prepandemic levelsthree years earlier, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. Early signs suggest the trend continued last year.
Overall, the number of big companies providing the perk rose about 14% since 2019, to 216 in 2022, figures from executive-data firmEquilar show. The number of executives receiving free flights grew nearly 25%, to 427.
Most companies report executive pay and perks in the spring.
Meta Platforms spent $6.6 million in 2022 on personal flights for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his then-lieutenant, Sheryl Sandberg—up about 55% from 2019, the Journal found. Casino company Las Vegas Sands spent $3.2 million on flights for four executives, more than double its annual expense in any year since 2015. Exelon, which owns Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison utility, more than tripled its spending on the perk since 2019.
Company jets have long symbolised corporate success and, to critics, excess. Companies typically say flying corporate is safer, healthier and more efficient. Some companies—including Cardinal Health, Raymond James Financial and Hormel Foods—added or expanded the perk in 2020 or 2021, citing pandemic health and safety concerns. Most spending growth came at companies already paying for personal flights in 2019.
Palo Alto Networks began subsidising personal flights for CEO Nikesh Arora in the year ended July 2022, spending about $650,000. That total rose to $1.8 million in its most recent fiscal year, plus a further $286,000 to cover his tax bill for the perk, the cybersecurity company said in an October securities filing.
The company said in filings that its board requires Arora to fly corporate in response to a security consultant’s report. “There was a bona fide, business-related security concern for Mr. Arora and credible threat actors existed with both the willingness and resources necessary for conducting an attack on Mr. Arora,” it said.
Companies report spending on flights they can’t classify as business-related, including trips to board meetings for other companies or commuting from distant residences. Some give executives a fixed personal-flight allowance in hours or dollars, and require reimbursement beyond that.
The sums have little financial impact on most giant corporations, even when annual flight bills exceed a million dollars. Critics say the free flights indicate directors too eager to please top executives.
“The vast majority of S&P 500 companies do not offer this perk,” said Rosanna Landis Weaver, an executive-pay analyst at As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder-advocacy group that has produced annual lists of CEOs it considers overpaid.
The Journal’s analysis reflects what companies disclose in securities filings, typically in footnotes to annual proxy statements. Federal rules generally require companies to itemize the perk for each top executive if it costs the company $25,000 or more in a year.
PepsiCo spent $776,000 on personal flights for five executives in 2022, double what it paid for the perk in 2019. Two-thirds of the spending subsidized flights by CEO Ramon Laguarta, who is required to use company aircraft for personal flights for safety and efficiency reasons. In an interview last spring, Laguarta said he sometimes ended business trips to Europe by flying to visit his mother in his native Barcelona. She died later in the year, in her 90s.
A PepsiCo spokesman said the company jet allows executives to reach remote facilities.
Personal jet use can draw investor and regulatory scrutiny. It contributed to the ouster of Credit Suisse’s chairman in 2022.
In June, tool maker Stanley Black & Decker settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it failed to disclose $1.3 million in perks for four executives and a director, mostly their use of company aircraft, from 2017 through 2020. In 2020, Hilton Worldwide Holdings settled SEC charges that it didn’t disclose $1.7 million in perks over four years, in part by underreporting costs for CEO Christopher Nassetta’s personal flights by 87%in two of those years. Hilton paid a $600,000 penalty.
Both companies settled without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
Stanley Black & Decker said it raised the errors with the SEC and settled without a fine. In 2022, Stanley Black & Decker reported spending nearly $143,500 on personal flights for former CEO James Loree and his successor, Donald Allan Jr., primarily to fly to outside board meetings or from second homes to work.
Hilton cited higher fuel prices in reporting about $500,000 in flights for Nassetta in 2022.
Spending on executives’ personal travel outpaced overall growth in business-jet traffic. Takeoffs and landings are up by about 19% since 2019, after dropping sharply in 2020, Federal Aviation Administration data show. Corporate spending on the perk rose 52%, the Journal found.
Higher fuel costs in 2022 contributed to the increase in spending, and there is little indication of a slowdown last year. Of the 15 S&P 500 companies that have reported spending on the perk in fiscal years ended in the second half of 2023, 10 said they increased spending, including three that didn’t report the perk a year earlier, securities filings show.
Sixteen companies that started paying for personal flights during the pandemic have since stopped. An additional 31 continued spending into 2022, with a median of $124,000. Accenture, Palo Alto Networks and concert promoter Live Nation Entertainment reported spending more than $500,000 apiece.
In 2020, Julie Sweet’s first full year as CEO, Accenture capped annual spending for her personal flights at $200,000, then doubled it the next year. Accenture raised the cap to $600,000 in its year that ended Aug. 31, when it spent about $575,000 on Sweet’s personal flights, the company said in a December securities filing.
In its filings, Accenture said it encourages Sweet to use company aircraft for personal travel, citing a security study the company commissioned.
Companies that provided the perk already in 2019 accounted for most of the recent growth in spending, the Journal found.
Meta, for example, spent nearly $11 million on Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s personal flights from 2015 through 2019, and a further $13.3 million over the next three years. Zuckerberg’s company-paid travel included trips on an aircraft he owns, which Meta charters for business, paying $523,000 in 2022. The Facebook owner stopped paying for Sandberg’s personal flights when she stepped down as a company employee in September 2022. She remains on Meta’s board.
Spokesmen for Meta and Sandberg declined to comment beyond Meta’s securities disclosures.
CEOs incurred most of the personal flight spending, making up half the executives receiving the perk in 2022 and two-thirds of the overall cost, Equilar’s data show.
At some companies, other executives are making up a bigger share of the cost. Four Norfolk Southern executive vice presidents accounted for just over half its roughly $370,000 in spending on personal flights in 2022, securities filings show. CEO Alan Shaw accounted for the rest. By contrast, the railroad reported subsidising flights only for then-CEO James Squires in the five years through 2020.
Shaw may take as many as 60 hours of personal flights on company aircraft before reimbursing Norfolk Southern, the company said in its filings. Personal use of company aircraft by executives other than the CEO was infrequent, it added. Norfolk Southern didn’t respond to requests for comment.
—Jennifer Maloney contributed to this article.
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Quantum computing is moving from theory to real-world investment. Professor David Reilly says it could reshape finance, security and global technology infrastructure.
3 min
For decades, the world’s computing power has quietly expanded at an astonishing pace.
From the first transistor developed at Bell Labs in 1947 to modern processors containing billions and even trillions of transistors, each generation of technology has been faster, smaller and more powerful than the last.
But according to quantum physicist and technology entrepreneur David Reilly, that era of effortless progress is beginning to slow.
Reilly, CEO of Sydney-based Emergence Quantum and Professor of Physics at the University of Sydney, says the computing infrastructure underpinning modern economies is approaching fundamental physical limits.
And that could have enormous implications for finance, artificial intelligence and global investment.
Speaking at an industry event organised by Kanebridge International, Reilly said many critical parts of modern society depend on computing and the infrastructure used to process information.
The slowdown behind the tech boom
For years, the technology industry relied on a steady improvement known as Moore’s Law, where the number of transistors on a chip doubled roughly every two years.
More transistors meant more computing power, allowing faster software, smarter devices and ever-larger data systems.
Today, however, those gains are slowing.
“It feels to me very innate that I’m going to just find that next year there’s going to be another breakthrough,” Reilly said.
“But if you look at the data…there’s a slowing down, a roll off in performance that started some 10, 20 years ago.”
Rather than making chips dramatically faster, manufacturers are now largely increasing computing capacity by packing more transistors onto each processor.
The approach works, but it comes with growing complexity, higher costs and increasing energy demands.
The brute-force race for AI
That challenge is already visible in the massive data centres being built to support artificial intelligence.
In the race to dominate AI, companies are constructing vast computing facilities that consume huge amounts of electricity and water. Reilly described this expansion as a “brute force” approach driven by the global competition to develop advanced AI systems.
Yet the demand for computing power continues to accelerate.
Artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, healthcare research, pharmaceuticals and cybersecurity all require far more processing capacity than today’s systems can easily deliver.
The question now facing the technology sector is whether traditional computing can keep up.
Enter quantum computing
That is where quantum computing enters the conversation.
Unlike conventional computers, which process information using binary switches that represent ones and zeros, quantum computers exploit the unusual behaviour of particles at the atomic scale.
Reilly describes them as a fundamentally different type of machine.
“So a quantum computer is a wave computer,” he said.
Instead of processing information through simple on-off switches, quantum systems can use wave-like properties of particles to process many possible outcomes simultaneously.
Those waves can interact in complex ways, reinforcing correct solutions while cancelling out incorrect ones. In theory, this allows quantum systems to tackle certain types of problems dramatically faster than classical computers.
What it could mean for finance
The concept may sound abstract, but its potential applications are significant.
Quantum computers are expected to transform areas such as materials science, chemical modelling and pharmaceutical development.
They could also help solve complex optimisation problems in logistics, finance and risk management.
For financial institutions in particular, the technology could offer new tools for detecting fraud, analysing market behaviour and optimising portfolios.
But the shift will not happen overnight.
“One message to take away is that quantum is not going to suddenly solve all of your problems,” Reilly said.
Instead, he said quantum systems will likely complement existing computing technologies as part of a broader and more diverse computing ecosystem.
Why data centres may soon “go cold”
One key change already emerging is how computing systems are physically designed.
Many next-generation technologies, including quantum processors, operate far more efficiently at extremely low temperatures. As a result, future data centres may rely heavily on cryogenic cooling systems to manage heat and energy consumption.
Reilly believes that the shift will gradually reshape the computing industry.
“Over the next five years, you’re going to see data centres go cold,” he said.
“And as that happens, they almost drag with them new compute paradigms.”
Emergence Quantum, the company he co-founded, is focused on developing technologies to support that transition, including cryogenic electronics and integrated hardware platforms designed for quantum computing and energy-efficient systems.
A new technological era
For investors and businesses, the technology remains in its early stages. But the scale of global interest is growing rapidly.
Governments, research institutions and technology companies are investing heavily in quantum research, betting it could become a foundational technology for the next generation of computing.
For Reilly, the moment feels similar to earlier technological turning points.
In the 19th century, new discoveries in thermodynamics helped drive the development of steam engines and the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, advances in electromagnetism led to radio, television and eventually the internet.
Quantum physics, he suggests, could represent the next chapter in that story.
“Today we have, as a society, in our hands new physics that we’re just beginning to figure out what to do with,” Reilly said.
“But I think it’s an exciting time to be alive and watch what happens over the coming decades.”
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