The CEO job of an airline startup is available, but it will cost you $250,000. The money will be used to market a $300 million fundraise to acquire and refurbish 14 Boeing 747s.

Avatar Airlines is a startup – some might call it fanfiction – that’s been claiming it’s getting off the ground since 1992. They used to call it Family Airlines. The founder even went to prison for tax and securities fraud in connection with raising money for the venture.

The website to apply to buy the CEO job is “apply-ceo-2” because they’ve tried this before.

Last summer they were looking to sell the CEO role an apparently didn’t get takers.

Our successful candidate must be able to make an immediate investment of $250,000 in turn you’ll receive an equity position and become a critical partner in shaping our innovative strategy.

Avatar has been mostly quiet for the past few years about their plan to fly Boeing 747s domestically. The idea was fine for service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon, I suppose. But what do you do with the plane out of Albuquerque on Wednesday? This has been their proposed route map:

According to their twitter account bio they’ve pivoted to sending the 747s on domestic Hawaii routes.

Major startup airline with every day ultra low fares as low as $19, with no economy fare over $99 servicing large city pairs in the U.S. & Hawaii

Some of my past favorites were when they were trying to sell pilot jobs for $75,000 to $150,000 (pilots would have low seniority numbers!). Now they want $250,000, but you get to be CEO!

They also issued a ‘letter of intent’ to Boeing to buy 30 747-8s five years ago. I’m not sure what their intent means at this point, considering that the FAA elected to stop processing their application to become an airline in… 1993.

Avatar said they “plan[..] to be valued at” over $1 billion “before [their] first flight leaves the ground.” I think they should be more ambitious, given inflation the past few years. Even struggling JetBlue has a market cap of nearly $2 billion. Why not plan to be worth $10 billion?

During the pandemic they claimed to be a better investment than money-losing legacy airlines since they weren’t an airline yet and therefore weren’t losing billions! That didn’t stop them from applying for government airline subsidies, of course.