Tony Fernandes, the outspoken boss of Malaysian budget airline AirAsia, is known for his bold moves. But his latest comment may have been a little too bold—and revealing.
In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, Fernandes posted a photo of himself shirtless and receiving a massage in a meeting room. “Got to love Indonesia and AirAsia culture that I can have a massage and do a management meeting,” he wrote in the post, which has since been deleted. Fernandes wrote that he was having a “stressful week,” and that the massage was a suggestion from an employee.
Fernandes is the CEO of Capital A, a holding company which owns AirAsia.
@airasia CEO #tonyfernandes being criticised for attending a board meeting while getting a massage and sitting shirtless. How many of his employees would actually been allowed to do that? Pic.twitter.com/ZYwS8sXnWu
— Sumit Chaturvedi (@joinsumit) October 18, 2023
Responding to a request for comment from Bloomberg, Fernandes said he “didn’t mean to offend anyone“ with his post. “You can never really explain the thought process behind a post, so I deleted it,” he continued.
Larger than life
Fernandes bought AirAsia, then heavily in debt, for less than a dollar in 2001. The airline rebranded itself as a “low fares, no frills” carrier, and soon became a leading budget airline in Southeast Asia.
The Malaysian businessman has long been a larger-than-life character, with commentators at times comparing him to his former boss Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur behind the Virgin Group.
In 2013, Branson dressed up as a female AirAsia attendant on a flight from Perth, Australia, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Fernandes and Branson owned different Formula 1 teams, and the two aviation executives agreed that whoever lost to the other would need to dress up as a flight attendant on the winner’s airline.
Fernandes also played the “Donald Trump” role in an Asian spinoff of the reality show The Apprentice, which aired for just one season in 2013. The show offered a one-year contract at AirAsia to the winner.
Yet the AirAsia head also courted controversy with his statements.
In 2010, Fernandes jabbed at the CEO of a competing airline, Tiger Airways, in several media interviews. He said Tiger’s then-CEO Tony Davis was “on drugs” for launching an airline in Australia, and claimed AirAsia was a better fit for the region because “we’re Asians, not a bunch of white guys.” (Tiger Airways eventually merged with Scoot, the budget carrier owned by Singapore Airlines.)
The AirAsia CEO also claimed in 2018 that Malaysia’s government, then under Prime Minister Najib Razak, pressured him to cancel extra flights in advance of the country’s general election. Malaysia’s aviation regulator denied the claim.
Fernandes, at the time, also apologized for releasing a video supporting the prime minister. (Najib lost the 2018 election, weighed down by the scandal surrounding 1MDB, and later went to prison on corruption charges.)
Beyond airlines
As Fernandes’s fortune grew, he made high-profile forays into other areas. He bought the Lotus Formula 1 racing team in 2010, which then became Caterham. Yet he exited the world of professional racing a few years later in 2014, later calling it a “disaster.”
Fernandes also bought the English football team Queens Park Rangers in 2011 from then Formula 1 CEO Bernie Ecclestone. He eventually sold his stake in the club last year, citing a wish to focus on his budget airline.
AirAsia, like many other airlines, was hit hard by the COVID pandemic and the collapse in travel. Yet the company is now recovering as tourism returns. The airline plans to fully reactivate its entire fleet by the end of the of year.
