David Neeleman
Brazilian-American aviation entrepreneur
David Gary Neeleman (born October 16, 1959) is a Brazilian-American businessman and entrepreneur. He has founded five commercial airlines: Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue Airways, Azul Brazilian Airlines, and Breeze Airways. Along with Humberto Pedrosa and Aigle Azur, he owned 45% of TAP Air Portugal. In 2017 he became a citizen of Cyprus.
Biography
Neeleman was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and raised in Sandy, Utah. He lived in Brazil until he was five.
His grandfather John Neeleman was born in Utah to Dutch immigrants and owned nine convenience stores.
Career
He co-founded (with June Morris) Morris Air, a low-fare charter airline, and from 1984 to 1988, he was the executive vice president of the company.
In 1988, Neeleman assumed the helm of Morris Air as its president. In 1993, when Morris Air was acquired by Southwest Airlines for $130 million (Neeleman received $25 million from the sale), he worked for five months on its Executive Planning Committee.
The public source identifies “David Neeleman” as brazilian-American aviation entrepreneur. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around David, Neeleman and Brazilian-American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1791549. VIAF identifies the subject as 268946675. The Library of Congress control number is n2004088184. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2017, 1984 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Neeleman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.