Marquee Jets

Jesse Itzler was a guest on a friend’s private jet when the business idea arrived fully formed. He looked around and thought: “What is this? What is this that I’m on?” He had never flown privately before. Within a few years, he had sold his private aviation company to Berkshire Hathaway.

The White Space

In the 1990s, flying privately meant three options. You could buy a plane outright — roughly $50 million, out of reach for most. You could buy a fractional share through NetJets, which required a five-year commitment and significant capital upfront. Or you could charter, which came with uncertainty: Who owns the plane? Who are the pilots? What if it doesn’t show up?

Itzler found the gap. As he described on MFM: “We only want to fly like 25 hours a year. I bet there’s a lot of people like us that don’t want to own an airplane, don’t want the responsibility — but they just want to be able to have a plane available on short notice.”

The solution was a 25-hour jet card that worked like a debit card. Book two hours, you have 23 left. No long-term commitment, no ownership headache, no mystery about who was flying the plane. They partnered with NetJets — their larger, established competitor — to provide the actual aircraft. Getting from A to B the fastest sometimes means partnering with the company you’re partially competing against.

From Jingles to Jets

The jump from the jingle business to private aviation seems random from the outside. Itzler disagrees. As he told Sam and Shaan: “Most of my successes in life haven’t been in my business plan — they’ve been opportunities that presented themselves.” He had the same business partner from his jingle days. The jingle business taught him sales, hustle, and how to identify what a niche market would pay for. The jet card business wasn’t a strategic pivot; it was an opportunity he recognized because he was paying attention.

Both businesses were fundamentally in the same category: making premium access feel simpler and more available than it was before. Jingles democratized professional music production for smaller brands. Marquee Jets democratized private aviation for people who didn’t want to own the infrastructure.

The Berkshire Acquisition

Marquee Jets was eventually sold to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which already owned NetJets — the partner Itzler had built the business around. The buyer was not a surprise. What was remarkable was that a business born from a single ride on a friend’s plane became significant enough to land on Buffett’s desk.

Itzler’s description of what drove him after the sale was telling. He said there’s no business he could build that would give him the return on investment he was getting from his family and health: “What, build another Marquee jet, work 20-hour days? That’s not going to give me that sense of impact, legacy for my kids, and that feeling.”

The Playbook

Sam Parr summarized the MFM takeaway on Itzler’s career arc: he found opportunities by being a guest somewhere, noticing what was missing, and moving fast. The underlying pattern — fly on a private jet, build a jet card company; drink coconut water, partner with Zico — is less about industry expertise and more about proximity to experiences that others haven’t fully built businesses around yet.

The Marquee Jets episode is often referenced on MFM as a case study in finding white space between existing options. Not better than the existing product, not cheaper — just positioned for a customer segment that the existing products were inadvertently excluding.

See also: jesse-itzler, warren-buffett, boring-businesses, acquisition-entrepreneurship