In this on‑site vlog, the narrator, a San Antonio resident living under the airport’s flight path, documents an unprecedented surge of private jets at San Antonio International Airport during the March Madness Final Four. He explains how the event has turned the airport into a “madhouse,” with a private jet landing roughly every 30 seconds. The video offers practical plane‑spotting tips (using the top of parking garages for a wide view) and highlights a quirky parking policy that gives disabled veterans free short‑term parking, leading to long‑term abandoned cars. The core of the vlog focuses on the business model of the local Fixed‑Base Operator (FBO) called “Millionaire.” Rather than relying on parking fees, Millionaire makes the bulk of its revenue by selling jet fuel at about $8 per gallon, earning roughly $5‑$6 profit per gallon. Given that each private jet consumes 600‑800 gallons per flight, the FBO can earn $5,000‑$6,000 per landing, turning the weekend into a windfall that may exceed its half‑year earnings. The narrator draws a parallel to the Sundance Film Festival’s relocation from Park City, warning against relying on one‑off lucky events and emphasizing the need for sustainable business strategies. He concludes with reflections on the fleeting nature of such windfalls and encourages viewers to consider both the upside of luck and the downside of over‑reliance on it.
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So I live here in San Antonio, 3 miles away from the San Antonio International Airport. And today, uh, precisely, I live in the flight path of how airplanes are coming in and out of the airport. And for the past 5 hours, it has been an absolute total madhouse. Every 30 seconds, there is a private jet flying overhead and landing. And this is really like not normal for San Antonio. San Antonio's whatever, not the wealthiest city. We have private jets come in here and there, but Generally, you know, typical day is a Southwest Airlines plane showing up every 5 minutes or so. And today here in San Antonio, we have something special going on that's causing all this craziness. And it is March Madness, the finals of the men's college basketball tournament. The Final Four teams are here. They play today, Saturday, and then again on Monday night. What this brings is money and lots of it to our fair city here in San Antonio. And look, for me, this is also kind of the Super Bowl of cool things that I'm excited about. Number one, because I'm a business nerd. And there is some serious economic interesting things happening with this much money and this much interest happening from people. And number 2, I love airplanes. So I have got to make a video here about what's going on at the San Antonio Airport and the crazy economics that are happening because of all of these airplanes coming in. And it's interesting because we don't have room for them all. So I'll show you that too. It's absolutely nuts. All right. So I'm pulling into the airport here. And here's my first tip. If you ever want to go watch airplanes at an airport or get an idea of how many airplanes are at your airport, you can go to the top of the parking garages and they routinely are taller than all the other buildings around. And you can see around sometimes for miles, but at the very least you can see all the airplanes that are at your airport. So that's my first stop. We'll go check it out. Holy crap. Look at all those jets over there. I mean, it's one of the crazy things about coming to a place like this and there's all these airplanes here, like if a tornado hit, there's like $250 million worth of airplanes just like sitting there not tied down for much of anything. So, uh, slight side quest for this video. Some people wonder why there's never any parking at the San Antonio International Airport. I will tell you why there's never any parking. About two decades ago, somebody decided in their wisdom to give all veterans free parking in the lots here at the airport, which you're like, cool, like, let's do that, you know, this is Military City, USA, we should definitely allow that to happen. The problem is is you give somebody a benefit like that, they take advantage of it like crazy. So there are tons of vehicles in here, and you can see them when you drive around, that have never moved, like in 6 or 9 months. Basically because somebody realized they can just park in short-term parking, they can rack up whatever fees they want, and they never have to pay because they're a disabled veteran. And this city has a ton of disabled veterans. You know, there'll be cars in here with more dust on them than the Sahara Desert because they've never moved. Turns out if you don't think things through, sometimes you get consequences you weren't really expecting. Join me and the 12 other people driving around looking for parking because we have none. Yeah, here, I'll back up. I'll show you precisely what I'm talking about. That one's been there for 4 months in short-term parking. Look at this one, it's been here forever. Look at it, somebody marked it up over a month ago, and because they're a disabled veteran, they can park for free. They're racking up $50 a day or whatever. Just crazy. So San Antonio is one of those awesome airports that has, uh, rental cars right on premise, so you don't have to go off-site to get to them. The downside is they take up all the upper levels of this garage, so now I gotta climb up the stairs to get up top so we can see some airplanes. Yeah, you can tell it's a big weekend in San Antonio. All the car rentals are taken except for that stupid Chevy truck there. That's ugly. There's another jet taking off. Crazy. So over there is where we're going to go next. But man, look at all those freaking planes. I mean, I've been over here before and there'll be maybe one, maybe two private jets, and there's like 30 right there. So because there's no room here, what you'll see is jets like that one dropping people off and then flying off somewhere else. It's cheaper for them to leave than to stay here and pay for parking. And that's where the story starts to get pretty interesting and where the economics of what's going on here are fascinating. All of these jets are parked at that business back there, and that's a special type of business connected to the airport, and it's a privately owned business. And in this case, it's called Millionaire. It's pretty cute, but basically it is a set of hangars and services for private planes, and it's called an FBO, fixed-based operations. Basically, the idea is that if you're a plane and you come and land at an airport like this and you're not one of these big kind of commercial jets behind me, you're in a situation where you come and become a customer of Millionaire. And Millionaire has a fascinating business model. You would think they make money kind of the old-fashioned way, like a parking garage, which I'm standing on top of a parking garage right now, that they would charge people to park their planes there. And oftentimes when times are busy like this, when parking is a premium, they might charge $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, or $20,000 to park this plane, their planes there for a couple days. But there's another way they make a shit ton of money, and that's the key of that for those fuel trucks that we saw over there. And it's fascinating how that works. So let's head over towards Millionaire, and I'll show you how their whole business model works, and, uh, we'll look at it from the roadside. It's pretty crazy. So if you're like a mere mortal, like us normies. You drive up, you get on American Airlines or something like that, and it's crowded, it's hard to get into, you're waiting in lines, wait for 30 minutes for a taxi. Super rich people don't have to go through all that. They go to Millionaire. Doot doot doo! Leaving the parking garage. All right, here's Millionaire. And literally, I'm gonna come down and then I'll turn back around and come back, but literally they have jets. There's so many jets here, they have them parked in the car park. Park. Just an insane amount of overcrowding. Just insane. And I think these jets actually have Auburn tails on them. These are Auburn-owned planes. Just absolutely nuts. Look at this, just packed with planes. Those were probably the planes for the, the team, now that I think about it. They flew in on private planes. Just absolutely nuts. Luxe cars, luxe vans, luxe people, the whole thing. Crazy thing is you could just walk in there, and I'll talk about that in a second. So what's fascinating about this business and Millionaire here is— oh look, they're bringing in more jet fuel right here. Um, what's crazy about this business is you can walk into that business into that building behind me, walk straight out in front of all those private jets, just basically do whatever you want. Um, you walk in there, there's no security, there's nobody standing around, there's free cookies, free coffee, free services, all this kind of stuff, somebody behind a desk. Uh, but that's kind of crazy. Like, you can't even go into an $8 movie theater without somebody stopping you, but here you just walk right in and there's all these services. But it ties back to, frankly, how this business makes all of its money, and it's not generally through parking. 'Cause parking's almost always really easy to get at these airports. It's hardly ever crowded like this. But where they make their real money is by selling these jetliners fuel. And while this, you know, this weekend they're able to charge for parking, in general they're making their money because they're selling you fuel when you land. So I looked up the price for today. It's $8 a gallon for jet fuel. And typically they'll make about $5, if not more, in margin per gallon. And you would say, well, that's okay, whatever, you know, $5 a gallon, no big deal, until you realize these jet— these private jets, they drink jet fuel by the gallon like crazy. So a typical little jet like this might have 600, 700, or 800 gallons of fuel that it burns between here and Florida, or even more. And you could do the math. Suddenly this place behind me, in exchange for giving you a bunch of free cookies, and letting you park your jet here is making $5,000 or $6,000 every time one of these jets lands. Just insane. So we'll walk up here. Pretty nuts. They got a nice little seating area and everything. Jets as far as the eye can see. Where are you going? I'm going straight to the game. Yeah. How are you? Good. It's one of the crazy things about life. If you just kind of act like you belong, you just like walk in there, uh, nobody ever questions you. You just like kind of just walk in. Uh, I've heard it called like the suit rule or something like that. Like you just wear a suit and act like you belong, you could pretty much get into anywhere. Uh, pretty crazy. And look, part of the reason I wanted to do this video, uh, was because I just got back from Utah. We hosted our conference there, and, uh, there was something that hit the news while we were there, which was the Sundance Film Festival, which is probably the Super Bowl of Park City. If you're not familiar with Park City, it's a very ritzy, expensive, elite neighborhood and town in Utah near Salt Lake City. Basically, the whole film festival, which had been a fixture inside of Park City and a huge revenue generator for decades for people that had operated Airbnbs there and hotels and shuttle services, everything had been a huge benefit because all these super wealthy people, just like this March Madness event, would show up and spend a metric ton of money every year for that film festival. It was the largest independent film festival in North America. So huge moneymaker. And a lot of people there in Park City bet a lot of money that they would continue to get the revenue from that kind of week and a half to week that people would come in for that film festival. And I read some stuff where people who owned Airbnbs and stuff like that there in Park City, they would recoup their entire year's expenses in January each year because of that film festival. They could charge that much for their rentals. And look, that all worked really well for decades, and you— they could all count on that, and it pushed a lot of prices for stuff up in the Park City area. Uh, the bad news is, uh, nothing lasts forever, and the Sundance Film Festival had placed itself out for bid, meaning other geographies and other towns could bid on hosting the event. And in this case, well, Park City lost. There were 3 finalists And the event is moving to Boulder, Colorado. And they're going to get all the benefit from it. And now potentially all these people are upside down. And the same thing applies here at Millionaire. I mean, look, realistically, you can do the math. There's 250 private jets coming through there. Each one's going to spend $6,000 or $7,000 worth of fuel profits for this Millionaire alone. It's basically the Super Bowl and a huge windfall for these guys. They may make more money this weekend than they'll make in the first half of this year. And it's a huge windfall and they're super lucky to get it. Here's the problem. San Antonio, because of our antiquated, basically, stadiums and kind of lack of foresight in terms of being competitive with other cities, we haven't been granted any more Final Fours. And we're not sure if we'll ever get one again. So while this millionaire and the FBOs here are having a hell of a weekend, you know, they're just lucky one time. We don't know when it's coming back. And as you think about business, it's important to be in the position that folks like this millionaire are, right? How do you set yourself up to get lucky? But then on the flip side of that, how do you not make a bet like the folks in Park City did that the good times and getting lucky would continue forever? And get yourself into trouble. Because some of those people in Park City, they may not be able to cover their costs anymore now that the festival is leaving, and, uh, that can get you in trouble. So, uh, try to be lucky on the upside and don't get killed on the downside. And if you do those things, well, business can be pretty good. Let me know what you think. Thanks for following along. At least had a good time looking at the airplanes. Talk to you later.
