I have flown with many businessman(I am one too) some good some bad but always has amazed me how they tell me how successful they have been in business and then tell me how much money they spend on flying 100K for plane 15K IR 20K a year to run aircraft 3K on fuel for IFR flights of which maybe 4 or 5 trips a year furthest destinations they go could be reached by Ryanair or Easyjet for £100.00- that doesnt seem great business sense to me personally
There is a huge amount of satisfaction to be had from doing a long trip across interesting scenery -
example - which you never see in the UK.
The fact that you could do it via an airline for much less is not relevant. You could apply that reasoning to any other means travel and the reduction to absurdity would lead to hitchiking everywhere.
Some people (a small minority, probably) do like to have interesting lives, and they realise that this is worth paying for. As I often say here, a simple way to guarantee that you will die very rich is to have a steady job, avoid relationships and social activities, keep your trousers zipped up, and invest every penny in financial instruments
Recently friend of mine successful businessman MBA etc threw all his money into flying operation because his ego new no boundaries and it folded leaving him bankrupt but in his other walks of life would never had been so mad.
Firstly, an MBA means s0d-all these days. A friend of mine has recently done it (aged about 55) and he says it is a complete waste of time when it comes to learning anything about running a business. It is a purely CV packing exercise. I have met many MBAs and all of them were clue-less on stuff like how to start a business and how to run it. And despite the title you don't learn about the detailed administration procedures which one has to do in a business to make it run smoothly. I learnt that when I was 21, when I started, hands-on. 33 years ago.
Secondly, trying to make money in aviation (I assume you meant GA) is quite difficult. One reason is that, for a training or charter operation, the barriers to entry are very low. The biggest one is throwing a pile of money at the CAA for the paperwork, but anybody can do that. This means the business is packed with amateurs who work for next to nothing, which means the margins are poor. And if you want to get into making parts (e.g. avionics) the barriers to entry are very high, partly due to certification requirements but mainly due to massive distribution channel loyalty to the big names which makes entry next to impossible because aircraft owners cannot buy (mail order) and install the stuff themselves.