Originally Posted by nako
Also note that the lifetime status on AA is for the life of the AAdvantage program.
Actually, it's for the "life of the AAdvantage Gold/Plat Elite program." So if they wanted, they could rename their elite levels Ruby/Diamond instead of Gold/Plat and dump all their lifetime elites. I doubt they'd do that, though, since lifetime elite status costs them next to nothing and gives a lot of generally-wealthy travelers an incentive to fly AA over the competition.