The Top 3 Weirdest Controversies Taylor Swift's Private Jet Caused

Taylor Swift is undoubtedly the world's biggest popstar. Her crowd-pleasing songwriting and production, along with her down-to-earth stage persona and openness to her fanbase, have made her a beloved icon for millions of listeners across the globe. A talent whose star has continued to rise and rise, for many fans, she is an artist who simply can't put a foot wrong, navigating the perils of the music industry and being a major celebrity in the digital world with ease. Even conspiracy theories surrounding Swift seem to lack traction.

But the truth is that even Swift can find herself at the center of controversy, and in her case, it tends to be for one recurring reason: her private jet. Swift is a major draw when it comes to live shows. Indeed, her most recent world tour, titled "Eras," ran from March 2023 to December 2024, included 149 shows, and generated a total ticket sale revenue in excess of $2 billion, shattering the record for the most lucrative concert tour in the history of music. But such a commitment includes a lot of air miles, and in Swift's case, it seems that the only way for the queen of pop to get around in the 21st century is by private jet — even if it does risk alienating some of her fans.

Taylor Swift has been the owner of two separate private jets during her career. She bought the first, a Dassault Falcon 900LX that is capable of holding nineteen people, in 2011 for $7 million. In 2024, she sold it to the Missouri-based car insurance company Car Shield for $40 million. At the time of the sale, she was already the owner of a far larger and more luxurious jet: A Dassault Falcon 7X, worth an estimated $54 million.

The 7X was Swift's primary mode of transport throughout her world record-breaking "Eras" tour. Though Swift has never publicly shared any information about her mile-high residence, the 7X is known to be highly customizable, and the pop star's has luxury wooden veneers, plush seats, and a catering galley. It is believed that the operating costs are in excess of $3 million a year, which some fans, who paid hundreds to thousands of dollars per ticket to see Swift live during the tour, argue is excessive and self-indulgent.

As the biggest artist on the planet, Taylor Swift makes prolific use of her private jet. Indeed, at the height of the "Eras" tour, she became notorious as the celebrity with the world's highest carbon footprint for personal air travel. Air travel is a major contributor to global emissions of carbon dioxide and has been identified as an industry in need of overhaul in the fight against climate change. After all, the results are already being felt around the world in the form of evermore extreme weather and other planet-altering side effects. 

Data from the climate campaign group Possible shows that just 12% of people — generally the wealthiest in society — account for around 66% of flights in the United States. One Yard study from 2022 showed that, on average, private jet-owning celebrities emitted more than 3,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in air travel alone. Meanwhile, the average person emitted just 7 metric tons per year in total. Some of the pop star's air trips were reportedly very short, occasionally seeing her and her crew in the air for just a few minutes before arriving at their next stop. Critics claimed that the air travel was unnecessary and, in such cases, seems to have been undertaken purely for the sake of luxury.

It is little surprise, then, that climate activists from the British campaign group Just Stop Oil decided to protest Swift's record-breaking air miles by daubing paint all over her jet when it was grounded in London. However, the protest didn't go to plan, as Swift's jet had already flown off again by the time of the attack. The protesters later wound up in court accused of criminal damage for causing paint damage to two other private jets.

Wherever Taylor Swift went during her "Eras" tour, it made big news, with Swifties descending en masse to witness the biggest show in the world and adding millions to local economies in the process. As such, it became something of a pastime among fans to follow their hero's every move — which meant spending a lot of time learning where her private jet was and where it was meant to be going next. And one particularly tech-savvy person decided to make following the "Eras" tour in real time as simple as possible. University of Central Florida student Jack Sweeney was responsible for creating a social media account, "@taylorswiftjets," that kept followers abreast of the aircraft's location, departure and arrival times, and, yes, her enormous carbon emissions.

The publication of such information in such a public forum soon caught the attention of Swift's legal team, who sent Sweeney a cease-and-desist notice. They claimed that the account amounted to stalking and likely made the tour more dangerous for Swift because it gave her real-time location to the world at all times. "Ms. Swift has dealt with stalkers and other individuals who wish her harm since she was a teenager," the notice informed Sweeney (per the Los Angeles Times). However, such tracking of aircraft is well within legal limits, as Sweeney was keen to point out. "This information is already out there," he told The Washington Post. "Her team thinks they can control the world." According to his lawyer, the account "does not violate any of Ms. Swift's legal rights."