David Neeleman

On February 14, 2007, an ice storm hit New York and JetBlue, the airline David Neeleman had built from nothing over the previous nine years, cancelled nearly 1,700 flights over the following days. The episode cost the company about $30 million. Three months later, on May 10, 2007, the board replaced the founder as chief executive with Dave Barger. A year after that, on May 21, 2008, Joel Peterson took the chairman's seat as well.

Look at what Neeleman had put into the thing before that week. He incorporated the company in Delaware in August 1998 and raised $128 million before a single plane flew, $40 million of it from JPMorgan. JetBlue's own Wikipedia entry records that the founders wanted to call the airline "Taxi" and paint it yellow, and that JPMorgan threatened to pull its money unless the name changed. The first passengers flew to Buffalo and Fort Lauderdale on February 11, 2000. The IPO, delayed by the September 2001 attacks, came in April 2002 and raised $260 million on Nasdaq. His 2002 pay was $200,000 plus a $90,000 bonus, and he gave all of it to the JetBlue Crewmember Crisis Fund, set up for employees in financial trouble. So the man who lost the top job in 2007 was not a founder who had stopped paying attention or started paying himself too much. He was a founder whose board decided a public airline needed a different kind of operator. His answer, judging by what he did next, was to go and start another one.

Five airlines, two continents, one board that decided it could do without him.

The pattern is consistent enough to put in a table. Each company was a low-fare carrier, each started with a fresh pile of investor money, and each time Neeleman moved on within about a decade.

The Brazilian one grew largest. Azul was set up on May 5, 2008, ran a public contest to pick its name ("Azul" beat "Samba"), and reported sales above 5 billion reais for 2013. By 2024 it carried 30.8 million passengers to 152 cities on 220 aircraft, with revenue of 19.5 billion reais. It trades on the B3 exchange in São Paulo and on the New York Stock Exchange. It also filed for Chapter 11 protection on May 28, 2025, with a plan to restructure its debt and exit in early 2026. Whether it did is not something the sources I could reach will confirm.

Neeleman was born in São Paulo, lived there until he was five, and grew up in Sandy, Utah, the grandson of a Dutch-immigrant family that ran nine convenience stores. At 23 he started a travel agency; the Deseret News reported in 2010 that it failed when an airline it depended on went bankrupt, and that the lesson he took was to keep a business stuffed with capital. In 1984 he and June Morris, who had founded Morris Travel in 1970, started Morris Air Service as a charter operation out of Salt Lake City. He was executive vice president until 1988 and then president. Morris Air went to scheduled service in 1992 and by late 1993 was running more than 1,000 flights a week with 21 Boeing 737-300s. It was also, according to its Wikipedia entry, the first airline in the world to sell ticketless travel, an idea for which Southwest later got the credit. Southwest announced it was buying the company in December 1993. Here the record gets slippery in the way that deal values often do: the Neeleman article says $130 million and that he personally received $25 million, while the Morris Air article says "over $120 million in stock". Take the round number and move on. He spent five months on Southwest's executive planning committee, left, and ran Open Skies, a touch-screen reservation and check-in company that Hewlett-Packard bought in 1999. In the same stretch he was one of the five founders of WestJet in Calgary, set up on June 27, 1994 on the Southwest and Morris Air model, and started the New York carrier that became JetBlue. He was 39 when JetBlue launched. He was 34 when he sold Morris Air. Those ages come from the same Deseret News piece, and they matter because they show a man who had already been through one sale and one failure before most founders have been through either.

Neeleman is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served a two-year mission in Brazil starting at 19. He speaks Portuguese, holds Brazilian, American and (since 2017) Cypriot citizenship, and picked Brazil for his fourth airline. The visible traces of the faith in his business record are these:

• He told NBC News in August 2012 that the mission was where "I saw extreme poverty" and learned to deal with people, and he went back to the same country to build Azul.
• On money, the same interview: "It's not your money, it's heavenly father's money and you should be good stewards over that money."
• The 2002 JetBlue salary and bonus, $290,000 in total, went to the employee crisis fund rather than to him.
• Breeze Airways is headquartered in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, a few miles from where he grew up, rather than in a hub city.

Breeze was set up on July 31, 2018, first under the name Moxy, with $100 million raised and a memorandum with Airbus signed on July 17, 2018 for 60 A220-300s. As of June 2026 it flies 56 of those plus 6 Embraer 190s to 85 destinations. Neeleman joined the board of the aircraft lessor Azorra in June 2022 and won the Tony Jannus Award in 2005. One controversy belongs on the record: in 2020 he funded a Stanford study by John Ioannidis on the prevalence of the coronavirus in Santa Clara County, and Ioannidis did not initially disclose the funding, which drew criticism (Wikipedia, David Neeleman). In 2015 he and Humberto Pedrosa bought 61 percent of TAP Air Portugal through Atlantic Gateway; by July 2020 the Portuguese state had taken its stake back up to 72.5 percent and Atlantic Gateway held 22.5. Six airlines, then, if you count the one he bought rather than built. He does not, and the count on his Wikipedia page stays at five.