Talk To Me

Three years after becoming the world’s social-media siren, Lindsey Pelas is flipping the script.

- Steven Leckart

The private jet was on fire, and Lindsey Pelas felt certain she was going to die. It was 2015, and she was flying to Los Angeles from Colorado with Dan Bilzerian, the brawny “King of Instagram” who’d helped her go viral the year before. After meeting her at the Playboy Mansion (she’d appeared on our Playboy Plus website in 2014), Bilzerian had produced a slow-motion video of Pelas jogging in a drastically undersized tank top. It garnered more than 10 million YouTube views and catapulted her from bartending to cashing in on Instagram, where she now has 7.7 million followers, and eventually led to her own highly rated podcast — but first let’s return to the burning jet.

It was accelerating down the runway when the brakes caught fire.

“The pilot was like, ‘Everybody off the plane!’ ” recalls Pelas. The aircraft screeched to a halt and the passengers made it out unharmed, but the trauma lingered. “It’s the most horrifying thing when you think you might actually die,” she says.