Slain tech exec Adam Robinson eerily said private jets were part of his identity before Learjet 60 crash

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. 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 trail...