Flying privately wasn’t just a one-off perk for Adam Robinson — it was “part of my identity,” the slain tech executive once admitted.
The 44-year-old Texas business mogul’s doomed passion for private aviation was captured in a resurfaced podcast clip that was recorded years before he, his wife and two young children — and five others — were wiped out when a Learjet 60 crashed into a Florida street Sunday.
Robinson recalled that he initially felt unworthy of bypassing the main terminal during an April 2023 episode of his business podcast, “Ten Years in the Making,” while interviewing Lolita Petrossov, co-founder of the on-demand private jet charter company JetSmarter.
“I’m sure a lot of people have no idea what JetSmarter is or was,” said Robinson, a former banker who later ran multimillion-dollar software companies Retention.com and RB2B.
“I had these Wall Street friends and hedge fund guys and whatever else, and some of my very rich friends were using it and I just assumed that it was inaccessible to me, you know, because they were almost using it as like this status symbol.
“You’d be sitting at a dinner table and then a guy would whip out his phone and he’d be like, ‘Do you guys want to go to Vegas tomorrow morning?’ Like, we can go on a PJ,” he continued, using the acronym for a private jet.
“And it’s like, yeah, actually, that sounds amazing.”
The Austin-based entrepreneur — who previously worked at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, according to his LinkedIn profile — said he soon started flying charter jets regularly.
“And it was this feeling that I got of, like, ‘Wow, I can actually fly private too.’
“It became part of my identity,” he said.
Here’s the latest on the fatal Learjet crash in Florida
Robinson was instantly killed alongside his wife Helen Sharp, 40, and their kids — Emma, 4, and Charlie, 2 — when Learjet 60 traveling from Texas to the Bahamas instantly plummeted almost 30,000 feet and completely disintegrated upon impact outside of a trailer park in Palm Beach.
Helen was a ceramics artist who frequently shared videos of her works on her Instagram, as well as pictures of the couple’s two young children.
Heartbreakingly, Robinson had reportedly been telling friends that his life was “going too well” in the weeks leading up to the tragedy.
He also posted an eerie message about plane crashes just months ago.
“You don’t need to crash a plane to learn to fly … and you don’t need VC to build a business,” he wrote in an April X post.
Robinson’s friends Rachael Reed and Charmi Fehr, nanny Anita Maria Apellido Cetina were aboard the ill-fated flight, as well as pilot Jeff Gregory and young co-pilot Nathalia Filgueiras, 20, who got her pilot’s license while still in high school.
Filgueiras can be heard screaming and pleading for help in haunting audio that picked up her final panicked moments as the plane rapidly descended.
The plane began to pick up ice and hit heavy turbulence before it exploded into a fireball and completely disintegrated on impact, scattering debris over a half-mile radius, authorities said Monday.
Officials are still investigating the cause of the crash, but aviation expert Justin Crabbe told The Post that the pilots chose to fly through a dangerous storm — then attempted a risky escape that may have doomed them.
