Lawsuits Fly Over Google Founders' Big Private Plane

[NVMojo]

Even billionaires have disputes with their contractors.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the low-key co-founders of Google Inc., set tongues wagging last year when they bought a used Boeing 767 widebody as an unusually large private jet. The 767-200 typically carries 180 passengers and is three times as heavy as a conventional executive plane. Mr. Page said last year that he and Mr. Brin would use it for personal travel, including taking "large numbers of people to places such as Africa." He said it would hold about 50 passengers when refurbished, but declined to comment on other details of the plane, which has been kept ultra secret.

Now the Delaware holding company that technically owns the 767, Blue City Holdings LLC, is embroiled in multiple lawsuits with an aviation designer hired to plan and oversee the massive plane's interior renovation.

Blue City in early 2005 hired Leslie Jennings, a high-end aviation designer whose work includes planes for Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and assorted royalty and heads of state, to transform the plane, which aviation records indicate previously flew for over a decade in Qantas Airways' fleet.

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http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115222788536400097-i72SXBBTMX_EPvtfDIn9uNjtiss_20070707.html?mod=blogs

[Kutjara]

1. Using an enormous commercial jet as a private plane...

...doesn't really seem in line with Google's "do no evil" corporate policy. But then, neither does colluding with the Chinese government in tracking political dissidents.

[Ian David]

2. Google is re-thinking their involvement with China. But even then...

I think they saw it as giving Chinese citizens a way to get access to the web (albeit with government censorship) without being turned-over to the Secret Police for doing "unlawful" searches on Yahoo.

The idea was that if they used Google, yeah, they'd be censored... but unlike using Yahoo, they wouldn't go to jail.

As for the corporate jet, it is a wasteful way to move 50 people around. But it's also safer than putting them on a smaller plane.