L.A. County Bills Bezos, Rihanna, Judge Judy and Other Celebrities for Unpaid Private Jet Taxes

Los Angeles County has sent tax bills to hundreds of private jet owners who allegedly failed to pay property taxes on their aircraft, targeting high-profile names including Jeff Bezos, Rihanna, Judy Sheindlin (Judge Judy), Stan Kroenke, Phil Knight, Alex Rodriguez, and "South Park" co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Under California law, private aircraft owners must pay an annual 1% property tax on their planes, assessed in the jurisdiction where the aircraft is "habitually situated" when not in flight, regardless of where the plane is registered or where the owner lives.

The bills, obtained by the Los Angeles Times through a public records request, were linked to owners using the flight-tracking database JetSpy. L.A. County Assessor Jeff Prang said his office identified hundreds of planes frequently situated in the county that were not paying taxes after obtaining ADS-B Out airplane location data. Among the largest notices: Bezos received a bill for approximately $244,000 in overdue taxes and fees; Kroenke, owner of the Los Angeles Rams, was billed roughly $290,000 for two private planes; a plane linked to Rihanna accumulated a bill of about $104,000; Parker and Stone owed approximately $95,000; Knight — whose jet carries a custom N1KE tail number — received a notice for about $89,000 for taxes due in 2022; and a plane linked to Rodriguez had a roughly $11,000 bill for 2025.

Sheindlin said the plane, operated through Her Honor Inc., was based in Florida and she had not realized she owed L.A. County taxes, as she filmed her TV show there; she said she paid the tax and penalty upon receiving the bill. Many other representatives for celebrity jet owners told the Times their clients were unaware of the tax obligation but paid promptly once billed. Jets linked to Michael Smith, chairman of Freeport LNG, and several media companies including Fox, CBS, and IHeartMedia were also on the list of entities that had not paid the tax, and a plane worth $46 million was linked to Beverly Hills-based private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners.

The assessor's office said it is bracing for appeals, and the county expects the effort to generate an additional $38 million in revenue. Prang said some jet owners had previously evaded the tax by keeping planes in hangars at private airports or registering them in states such as Montana, which does not levy property taxes on personal aircraft.

The use of ADS-B Out location data by local tax authorities has proved controversial. Louisiana recently banned local officials from reviewing it, and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told lawmakers in May that he and his staff "frown on the concept." Prang dismissed privacy objections, calling them "just a made up excuse."

This case shows how a tax rule written around physical presence — where an aircraft actually sits on the ground — collides with a fleet that is designed to be mobile and often registered far from where it is based. Owners who parked jets in low-tax states like Montana or kept them in private hangars to avoid scrutiny discovered that a jurisdiction's own tracking of ground time, not registration paperwork, determines liability.

The mechanism that made this enforcement possible is new: pairing a commercial flight-tracking database with ADS-B Out location data lets an assessor's office reconstruct where a plane actually spends its time, rather than relying on self-reporting. That is a meaningfully cheaper and more complete audit trail than tax authorities previously had, and it explains why a single county can suddenly identify hundreds of non-paying aircraft at once.

The pushback already visible — Louisiana's ban on local review of ADS-B data and the FAA administrator's own discomfort with the practice — suggests other jurisdictions and aircraft owners will contest whether this kind of tracking should be usable for tax assessment at all. Whether more counties adopt the same JetSpy-plus-ADS-B approach, and whether legislatures elsewhere follow Louisiana in restricting it, will determine if this becomes a standard enforcement tool or an isolated case confined to Los Angeles County.