SetFlight News
Dispatches for people who fly private.
The luxury world, covered across motors, travel, style, homes, gear, food & drink, lifestyle, and books. Read the archive, and subscribe to the topics you care about.
The Two-Million-Dollar Bottle: The Story of the Macallan 1926
It was distilled the year before the Great Depression, forgotten in a cask for sixty years, and bottled just forty times. Today a single bottle sells for more than a house. Here is how whisky became the most valuable liquid on earth.
The Seed Merchant Who Invented Golf's Greatest Rivalry
He made his fortune selling flower seeds in penny packets, took up golf at fifty for his health, and put up a small gold trophy that became the fiercest team contest in sport. Meet Samuel Ryder.
The Rock Singer Who Rebuilt the Porsche 911 Better Than Porsche
Rob Dickinson fronted a British rock band, then walked away to chase a stranger obsession: taking an old Porsche 911 apart and putting it back together as close to perfect as money and patience allow.
The Billionaire's Research Ship: How Paul Allen's Octopus Found a Sunken Battleship
Most superyachts exist to be seen. Paul Allen built one to disappear over the horizon, carry two submarines, and go looking for the wrecks that had been lost for seventy years.
The Night the Art Market Grew Up: Peter Wilson and the 1958 Goldschmidt Sale
For centuries, buying old paintings was a dusty, private trade. Then one October evening in 1958, a Sotheby's chairman put seven Impressionist masterpieces on stage in black tie, sold them in 21 minutes, and turned the auction into theatre.
The Escapement the Swiss Said No To: George Daniels and the Co-Axial
In 1999 Omega fitted a genuinely new escapement to a production watch. An Englishman working alone had invented it twenty-five years earlier, and the industry had spent that whole time saying no.
The Two-Billion-Dollar Building: How 15 Central Park West Changed Real Estate
Two brothers bought a full block beside Central Park, hired an architect the avant-garde despised, and wrapped the whole thing in old-fashioned limestone. It sold out for two billion dollars and rewrote the rules.
The Man Who Invented Modern Philanthropy: Frederick Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation
In 1913 the richest man in America handed a former preacher a hundred million dollars and a question nobody had answered properly: how do you give money away so that it actually fixes things?
The Bet That Invented the Winter Holiday: St. Moritz
Nobody went to the Alps in winter. The snow was something to endure, not enjoy. Then in 1864 a Swiss hotelier made a wager with four Englishmen that created an entire industry, and a resort that still glitters.
The Champion Who Retired at 28 and Built Augusta
He won everything there was to win in a single year, then walked away from competition forever at the age of twenty-eight. What Bobby Jones did next was build the most famous golf course in America.
Born on the Western Front: How Louis Cartier Built a Watch From a Tank
In 1917 Louis Cartier looked at the machine tearing across the battlefields of France and saw, of all things, a wristwatch. A century later the Tank is still the most quietly radical thing you can wear.
She Bet Her Fortune on a Rusting Hull: Elizabeth Meyer and Endeavour
By 1984 the greatest racing yacht of the 1930s was a roofless steel shell filling with rain. One woman bought the wreck, put almost her entire net worth into it, and single-handedly revived an entire class.
From a Blown-Up BMW to Owning Bugatti: The Mate Rimac Story
A teenager in Croatia blew up the engine of his cheap BMW, converted it to electric out of spite, and set world records. Fifteen years later he runs Bugatti. This is how the establishment got beaten.
The Ranking That Has Governed Bordeaux for 170 Years
In 1855 an emperor asked some wine brokers to make a list. They ranked the great châteaux by price into five tiers, and that list, drawn up in a matter of weeks, still decides the fate of the world's most famous wines today.
Twenty-Seven Dollars: How Muhammad Yunus Reinvented Lending to the Poor
An economics professor lent 27 dollars of his own money to 42 women in a Bangladeshi village. It grew into a bank for millions, a Nobel Peace Prize, and a whole new idea about who deserves credit.
The Island Richard Branson Bought for $180,000
A Caribbean island was listed at six million dollars. A broke young entrepreneur offered a fraction of it as a stunt, got laughed out of the room, and a year later owned it for one hundred and eighty thousand.
How Three Gallerists in Basel Built the World's Most Important Art Fair
In 1970, three dealers in a small Swiss city started a modest fair simply called 'Art.' It grew into a global empire that now decides, more than any museum or critic, what the art world pays attention to.
The Asthmatic Engineer Who Shrank the Camera: Oskar Barnack and the Leica
He could not lug the heavy plate cameras of his day up a mountain, so he built a tiny one that used strips of movie film. In doing so he invented 35mm photography and handed the twentieth century its eyes.
Drive Carefully, Me: The Rolex That Became the Most Expensive Watch on Earth
Rolex could barely give the Cosmograph Daytona away in the 1960s. Then a movie star wore one, a nickname stuck, and in 2017 his own watch sold for nearly eighteen million dollars.
Why Golf Has 18 Holes: The Old Course at St Andrews
Every golf course on earth has 18 holes, and almost no one knows why. The answer lies on a strip of Scottish coastland where the game has been played for six centuries and where, in 1764, someone decided four holes were too short.
The 143-Million-Dollar Car: Inside the Secret Sale of the Uhlenhaut Coupe
In 2022 a single car sold for more than double the previous record for any car in history. It was not a Ferrari. It was a Mercedes that had never raced, driven for years as one man's company car.
From a Fifty-Dollar Dinner to Fashion's Biggest Night: Who Really Built the Met Gala
The most photographed party on earth began in 1948 as a modest fundraiser dinner with fifty-dollar tickets. Three very different women turned it into a machine that raises millions and stops the internet.
The Prince, the Mistress, and the World's Most Expensive Wine
In 1760 a French prince and a king's mistress went to war over a tiny patch of Burgundian dirt smaller than a football field. The prince won, took its wine off the market entirely, and gave it his name. It is still the most coveted wine on earth.
The People Who Take Superyachts Where Yachts Cannot Go: EYOS Expeditions
Anyone can charter a yacht to the Riviera. Reaching Antarctica, the Northwest Passage, or the deepest point in the ocean takes a company that spent fifteen years learning how to do it safely.
Monaco Is Building Land in the Sea: The Story of Mareterra
The most expensive real estate on earth has a problem: there is almost none of it, and no more can be made. Monaco's answer is audacious. If you cannot find more land, build it in the Mediterranean.
The $832 Million Estate That Gave It All Away
When the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller came to auction in 2018, it broke every record for a single collection. The most remarkable thing was not the total. It was that every last dollar went to charity.
Mr. Market and the Margin of Safety: Benjamin Graham's Enduring Lesson
Warren Buffett calls it the best book on investing ever written. Its author, a professor ruined in the 1929 crash, spent his life turning speculation into a discipline, and his two simplest ideas still outlast every fad.
Twice Founded in Glashutte: A. Lange & Sohne and the Watch That Came Back From the Dead
Ferdinand Adolph Lange built a watch industry in a poor Saxon mining town in 1845. A war and a nationalization erased it. In 1990, his great-grandson started again from nothing.
The Man Who Refused to Sell the Coastline: Samuel Morse and Pebble Beach
He owned some of the most valuable oceanfront land in America and could have carved it into private lots worth a fortune. Instead he gave the coast to a golf course, and created the most beautiful public round in the world.
Gordon Murray's Masterpiece: Why the McLaren F1 Has Never Been Beaten
Stuck at an airport in 1988, a Formula 1 designer sketched the greatest road car ever made. Three decades on, with every advantage of modern technology, no one has truly improved on the McLaren F1.
The Billionaires Who Gave Away Patagonia: Doug and Kris Tompkins
The founders of The North Face and Patagonia spent their fortunes quietly buying up vast tracts of wild land at the bottom of the world. Then they gave it all away, and created national parks the size of small countries.
The Yacht That Could Switch Its Engines Off: Feadship's Savannah
In 2015 a Dutch shipyard launched a superyacht that could run on a single diesel, on batteries, or in near-silence with almost nothing turning. It was the first of its kind, and it changed what owners ask for.
The 500-Million-Dollar Fantasy: How Bel Air's 'The One' Collapsed
It had a moat, a nightclub, and a glass jogging track wrapped around the outside. It was going to sell for half a billion dollars. Instead it went bankrupt and sold for a quarter of that, a monument to ambition unmoored from reality.
The Dealer Who Paid His Artists Before They Sold a Thing: Leo Castelli
He put unknown painters on a salary whether or not their work sold, and in doing so he built the careers of Johns, Warhol, and Lichtenstein, and moved the whole capital of the art world from Paris to New York.
The Sake Brewer's Son Who Carried Scotland to Japan
A young Japanese man sailed to Scotland in the 1910s, learned to make whisky, married a Scottish woman, and brought it all home. From that journey came two rival empires and an entire national industry that now beats the Scots at their own game.