The average air traveler makes 5.3 trips per year, according to trade group Airlines for America. Billionaire Elon Musk makes more trips than that in a month as the jet-setter takes off for business trips, to schmooze with politicians or kick back in vacation spots.
One day, he might be in Austin viewing a prototype of Tesla Inc.’s new Cybercab and the next he’s in Europe talking about SpaceX’s plans for future Mars missions. (He wouldn’t mind dying on Mars, he says, just not on impact.)
The full extent of his travel is hard to pin down but here’s a sampling of where the world’s richest man was in January.
As he zig-zags around the world in his 2015 Gulfstream G650ER, the full extent of Musk’s travel can be hard to pin down. His itinerary, which could formerly be seen through publicly available trackers such as FlightAware, is now less certain. The flight data such trackers used to capture can now be hidden from public view after legislation allowing private aircraft owners to withhold aircraft registration numbers and other personal information.
Still, Musk occasionally shares his whereabouts and news coverage often provides clues. For other trips, programmer Jack Sweeney has reportedly used crowd-sourced flight data from people using their own receivers to collect data from planes. Sweeney’s data for Musk’s travels in January tallied thousands of miles and more than 91,000 pounds of jet fuel consumed.
The fuel his Gulfstream burns has been met with questioned by climate activists and Musk critics, who have questioned if his frequent flying contradicts Tesla’s marketing, which has been geared toward consumers desiring a cleaner mode of transportation than gasoline-powered vehicles.
But even Tesla doesn’t appear primarily focused on an environmentally friendly mission. The company recently changed its mission statement from “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy” to “building a world of amazing abundance.”
For Musk, one measure of abundance is his high air mile count, which as recently as 2018 reached more than 150,000 miles in a year.
Those miles translate into a significant carbon footprint. A research paper in Global Environmental Change noted that individual users of private aircraft can contribute to emissions of up to 7,500 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Musk is already racking up a high emission count for this year, with Sweeney’s estimates suggesting his CO2 emissions reached nearly 150 tons.
But Musk doesn’t appear concerned, as his frequent travel continued into February with a visit to California. After documents were released by the Department of Justice revealing Musk had friendly email exchangess with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted the narrative to how busy he is with his workload. Piggybacking off of a post that defended Musk and said wouldn’t have had time to visit Epstein, Musk wrote on X that he worked most weekends, and still does.
“Only left the Tesla engineering lab in Palo Alto a few hours ago,” Musk wrote the day after the files were released, suggesting he had taken off from Austin recently.
