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ExclusiveAirAsia’s Tony Fernandes on 2014 crash and mum’s death: ‘the toughest times’ of his life

The Malaysian entrepreneur’s future could be read in the stickers on his 1970s tuck box: an airline, a London football club and an F1 team

But for all his success, nothing could have prepared him for the loss of an airliner with 162 people on board

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Tony Fernandes, founder of low-cost carrier AirAsia, in Hong Kong. Photo: Tory Ho

Published: 10:30am, 27 Jul 2019Updated: 10:29am, 29 Jul 2019

Tony Fernandes is a storyteller. In interviews, he tends to stack them up. “That’s another good story,” he’ll say in the middle of an entirely separate one. “Tell you that one afterwards.” And so they circle overhead in a conversational holding pattern, appropriately enough for a man who founded an airline.

It’s one of his best tales: how he bought AirAsia – two planes, massive debt – for a single Malaysian ringgit (about HK$2) in 2001 and turned it into an astounding success. Last month, when the Skytrax World Airline Awards handed AirAsia the title of World’s Best Low-Cost Airline, it was for the 11th time in a row. That same month, a Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle clue for 63 Across was: “Budget carrier headquartered near Kuala Lumpur”.

As old-school start-ups go, it’s a perfect narrative and people like to hear it. It helps that Fernandes subsequently took on Formula One (not quite so successfully) and football (he’s the majority shareholder of London-based Queens Park Rangers).

It also helps that he cuts a casually affable figure. His name card features his photo with a red baseball cap and a red speech bubble that announces “Hello, I’m Tony”. Everyone’s name card at AirAsia follows that template: personal photo, personal greeting. He wants to have you at hello.

When he appeared at the Rise tech conference in Hong Kong recently, he strolled onstage, hand in pocket, wearing a Supreme Martin Luther King T-shirt and a red baseball cap, and proceeded to address the standing-room-only crowd as if it were a bunch of mates. He has a comedian’s timing. “I told my wife I’m going to start an airline.” Pause. “She divorced me.” (Laughter.) He tailors his patter to his location. “Everyone thinks I’m Richard Branson, which I’m not.” Beat. “He wants to go to the moon and fly hot-air balloons. I want a beer in Lan Kwai Fong.” (Laughter.)

He updates his shtick. When he told his Hong Kong audience how he’d recognised a business opportunity during the Sars crisis of 2003, he said, “I know Malaysians well. They’ll risk their lives for a bargain – ‘800 ringgit? I’m not going! 80 ringgit? Who cares?’” (Laughter.) I’d read that line before in a 2013 interview; then it was 400 ringgit.