On 14 October 2012 Felix Baumgartner let himself fall from 38,969 metres and became the first man to break the speed of sound with no engine around him. Red Bull had paid for all of it: the capsule, the balloon, the years of testing, the worldwide live feed. It did not do it to appear on a helmet. It did it to own the event.

That is why, more than a decade later, Red Bull Stratos is still the case people reach for when they need to explain the difference between sponsoring something and building it.

Felix Baumgartner’s jump: the real numbers

The speed of sound is roughly 1,200 kilometres per hour — 340 metres per second — but it moves with the consistency, humidity, temperature and density of the air. If you are Felix Baumgartner and you are about to drop from nearly thirty-nine thousand metres, you know these things. Or somebody has told you.

You also know it took decades to fly an aeroplane faster than sound: it was 14 October 1947 when Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in level flight. If you are Baumgartner, that date has been circled on your calendar for years — and it is no accident that the jump took place on the same day, sixty-five years later. You know, too, that the first supersonic prototypes came apart in mid-air under the laws of the transonic regime: they pulverised themselves against an invisible wall, which is where the phrase sound barrier comes from. You have factored that in.

The definitive figures, released in February 2013 after the telemetry was analysed, are these: exit altitude 38,969 metres (127,852 feet), top speed 1,357.6 km/h, equal to Mach 1.25, free fall lasting 4 minutes and 19 seconds. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale ratified three of them as world records: exit altitude, vertical speed and free-fall distance.

The fourth record Baumgartner was chasing — free-fall duration — stayed with Joe Kittinger, who in 1960 had spent 4 minutes and 36 seconds in the air. Kittinger, as it happens, was the voice speaking to Felix from mission control throughout the ascent. That mark survived because the air up there does not behave like the air we breathe: you fall faster, so you finish sooner.

Red Bull Stratos was not a sponsorship. It was an activation

Calling Red Bull the “sponsor” of Stratos is imprecise. A sponsor buys space inside an event that already exists. Red Bull, in this case, invented the event, funded it, produced it and broadcast it: it owned the content, the rights, the calendar and the risk.

What it cost we do not know for certain, and that is worth saying rather than pretending otherwise: Red Bull has never made the figure public. The estimates that have circulated for years place the project between $30 million and $50 million, covering research, development, equipment and years of testing. Only one line of that budget is known precisely, and it raises a smile: around €70,000 of helium alone.

What is documented is the return. The jump destroyed the ratings record for Austrian television and the record for simultaneous audience on YouTube, with around 8 million viewers connected at the same moment: at the time, the highest figure ever recorded for a live stream. It was carried by more than forty television channels in the United States alone and relayed by over 130 feeds. A single post on Red Bull’s Facebook page generated roughly 210,000 likes, 10,000 comments and 29,000 shares in under a minute. Seconds after the landing, a tweet from NASA congratulated Felix and Red Bull. When NASA congratulates you, you have just done something that counts.

Analyses at the time valued the media exposure generated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even taking the top end of the spending range, the ratio is not one that needs rounding to be convincing.

Why the bull spends this way

Red Bull has built an empire on sports sponsorship. The Austrian company, born in 1984 out of the meeting between Dietrich Mateschitz and Thai entrepreneur Chaleo Yoovidhya around a South-East Asian drink, closed 2024 with €11.2 billion in net revenue and 12.7 billion cans sold.

Its stated marketing budget runs to some $3 billion, and almost half of that ends up in sports sponsorship. It is not a share you see elsewhere: most fast-moving consumer brands sit an order of magnitude below. The philosophy, though, has not changed since 2012, and it is consistent in a way few are — Red Bull is wherever there is adrenaline. From Formula 1 to MotoGP, from motocross to street sports, from skateboarding to surfing, from BMX to base jumping, out to more than six hundred athletes under contract.

The logic underneath is what we have elsewhere called activation: the logo produces no return on its own, what you build around it does. Stratos is simply the furthest point this reasoning has ever reached — the case in which the activation devoured the sponsorship until it replaced it.

Thirteen years on

Of the two people who made this story possible, neither is still with us.

Dietrich Mateschitz died on 22 October 2022, aged 78. He was the man who decided investments of this kind and who, despite being the richest man in Austria, gave very few interviews: one of the rare exceptions came, fittingly, on the occasion of Red Bull Racing’s first Formula 1 world title.

Felix Baumgartner died on 17 July 2025, aged 56, in an accident with a powered paraglider at Porto Sant’Elpidio, in Italy’s Marche region. He had crossed the sound barrier with his own body and was lost a few dozen metres from the ground, on a day off.

The numbers remain, and so does the precedent. Every time a brand asks whether it is better to buy visibility inside an event or to build one of its own, the reference answer is still that capsule hanging from a balloon above New Mexico. Not because it is repeatable — almost nobody has $30 or $50 million and the freedom to stake it on a man who might die on live television — but because it proved something that holds at any scale: attention is not bought by the square metre, it is built by giving it a reason to exist.

Anyone who wants to understand how this logic translates into less vertiginous and more applicable programmes will find it in our guide to sponsorships that work, while the comparison between the big brands that have chosen sport is told in Brands x Sports: who’s doing well right now.

Video of Felix Baumgartner’s jump