Why do billionaires buy used private jets?

Really super rich? Why would you buy a pre-owned aircraft? You could say the same thing about somebody who's not so rich, but fairly well-to-do, and they buy a used car. Sometimes you want immediate satisfaction, and if you want immediate satisfaction, you can't buy a new aircraft because it could take one to two and a half years to actually order an airplane and get it manufactured and delivered the way you wanted it custom made.

But the other thing is, like a car, an airplane isn't normally a depreciating asset. Once you buy it and you take it off of the showroom floor, if you want to call it that, the price will depreciate, of course. In the past year, because of COVID and because of a lack of supply, prices actually went up instead of going down, which is a real anomaly.

In the history of aircraft, that's never happened, which is about 60 years, but this is the first time it did. Now the market is leveling off, and if you could buy an aircraft for a significant discount, if it's two, three, four, five, ten, fifteen years old, it does exactly the same thing as a new one. Maybe you might have newer avionics, which are the radios in the cockpit, or it might have a different altitude or something like that. But if you could buy some half price off of a new one, that makes a very convincing sales story.