Topline
Billionaires, musicians, sports team owners and celebrities from a range of industries have been slapped with bills from the Los Angeles county tax collector and told they owe as much as $240,000 in unpaid taxes on their luxury jets, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
Jeff Bezos attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 15, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
Getty Images
Key Facts
Private jet owners in California, who are subject to an annual 1% property tax on their plane, have apparently been failing to pay their taxes on time and L.A. County Assessor Jeff Prang has sent $38 million worth of bills to a laundry list of famous names.
Billionaires who were slapped with tax bills include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($244,000), Rams owner Stan Kroenke ($290,000), Rihanna ($104,000), Nike co-founder Phil Knight ($89,000) and “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone ($95,000), according to a list obtained by the Times and verified with JetSpy, a company that investigates the ownership of private planes.
The tax is owed on airplanes that are “habitually situated” (or sitting on the ground) in California most of the time they aren’t in the air, and those who fail to pay are charged a penalty fee.
Most representatives for the celebrity jet owners told the Times they didn’t know they needed to pay an L.A. county tax and that they paid it quickly once they found out but some, including Bezos and Knight, hadn’t paid up by the June 30 deadline.
Judy Sheindlin, best known as TV’s “Judge Judy,” told the Times she “begrudgingly” paid the two bills she received (from 2022 and 2025) because she thought it’d be more expensive to have her lawyers fight it.
Those who think they’ve been wrongly charged can appeal their bill and have it reduced based on how much time it spent out of state, and staff in Pang’s office said they’re bracing for a slew of arguments.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“There are plenty of billionaires who say ‘I’m going to get into this because it’s not right,’” Sheindlin said. “I’m not going to stress myself if I don’t have to.”
SURPRISING FACT
The planes don’t have to be registered in California to be charged the tax, and their owners don’t have to live in the state.
KEY BACKGROUND
It has long been hard for tax assessors and other officials to determine what planes should be taxed because they’re relatively easy to hide in private hangers or on private property, but Prang’s office recently obtained controversial ADS-B Out location data that shows exactly where a plane spends its time. The system uses satellite-based GPS positioning, different from traditional radar, to broadcast plane data to anyone with a receiver once per second. It’s considered one of the most accurate ways to determine a plane’s location, according to the Times, and the Federal Aviation Administration has required planes to adopt it to help avoid collisions. But using it to tax plane owners has been controversial, and some states have banned local officials from reviewing it. Republicans are trying to limit how the data can be used because they say the privacy concerns deter pilots from installing the “potentially life-saving technology.”
CHIEF CRITICS
Billionaires and other high-net-worth people aren’t criticized for having private jets just because they’ve forgotten to pay some local taxes. Private planes have a reputation as one of the most egregious symbols of excessive wealth and multiple studies in recent years have looked at their environmental and economic impact. The High Flyers 2023 report from the Institute for Policy Studies said private jets make up roughly one in every six flights handled by the FAA, but contribute just 2% of the taxes that primarily fund the agency. Private jet owners represent 0.0008% of the global population, the report said, and most owners are male, over 50 and work in banking, finance or real estate. Private jets emit at least 10 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger, according to the report.
BIG NUMBER
133%. That’s how much the size of the global private jet fleet increased from 2000 (when there were 9,895) to 2022, when there were 23,133.
Leave a comment