T-Pain admitted he once believed owning a private jet simply wasn’t in the cards for him — before eventually surprising his family with one.
The R&B star stopped by Juvenile and Mannie Fresh’s Still 400 podcast on Wednesday (Feb. 18), where the topic of his major purchase came up. Just last month, T-Pain revealed in a vlog that he had gifted his family a brand-new personal jet.
Around the three-minute, 45-second mark of the episode, the two-time Grammy winner said he felt like “it was time” to finally make the move.
“A lot of people I knew coming up got planes, and I always wanted to figure out how that was possible,” he shared. “I thought you, one, had to be rich and two, you had to be white. So I didn’t know that n***as could have planes. I didn’t think we was allowed.”
T-Pain said he initially capped his dreams at luxury cars, thinking a private jet was completely out of reach — especially when he looked at artists like Juvenile and Mannie Fresh riding in high-end whips.
“So when I came up and I went to a dealership just to just to look around, I’m like, ‘I got a little bit of money. I probably got 50 cash on me,’” he recalled. “And they’re like, ‘You know, you can just you just put a down payment and and take it.’ I’m like, ‘What?’”
He later added with a laugh, “Once I learned what a lease is, I’m like, ‘It’s over for you.’”
Ironically, just a year before purchasing his jet, T-Pain had been vocal about why he refused to fly private, pointing to the steep price tag in an Instagram reel.
“To take a private jet from Atlanta, to Vegas and then back to Atlanta is $126,000,” he said. “‘Are you OK now? Do you feel like it? ‘No private jet?’ What, you’re not taking a private jet? You’re not spending all this money to go make money? Why would you do that? In what world is that smart? Then y’all will be like, ‘He’s going broke again.’”
