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The 25 Greatest Superyachts of the Past 100 Years

Yacht design and technology—from steam engines to hydrogen fuel cells—have changed dramatically over the last century. these 25 standout vessels have been at the forefront of that revolution., julia zaltzman, julia zaltzman's most recent stories.

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A Century of Sea Change

Yachts have seen remarkable transformations in design and technology in the last 100 years. The lengths and shapes have changed decade by decade, from the mini-ocean liners of the 1920s to a more glamorous, fuller shape by the 1950s, eventually giving way to the layered wedding-cake construction that was so popular until about a decade ago. Now, just about anything goes, judging from the list below, with yachts boasting vertical bows being the most popular.

Technology also changed over the years, from steam engines to diesel to a growing list of hybrid diesel-electric powerplants. In the next five years, expect to see the first generation of superyachts with hydrogen- or methanol-powered fuel cells. What really hasn’t changed in the last century are owners’ desires to create superyachts that are unique, often clashing with the accepted design norms of the time.

Here are the 25 greatest superyachts from the last 100 years.

'Delphine' (257 Feet 9 Inches) 1923, U.S.A.

Delphine is the original 1920s oceangoing queen. American automobile magnate Horace Dodge commissioned the vessel, rumored to have once hosted former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and Michigan shipbuilding company Great Lakes Engineering Works built it in 1921. At 258 feet, Delphine remains the largest yacht ever built in the U.S. that is still in operation. She is also the largest active steam-driven yacht in existence. The two original 1,500 hp steam engines were re-equipped with two modern water-tube boilers during a 2003 refit, which provide 18 metric tons of steam per hour. Surviving a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, several fires, and multiple owners, Delphine is today fully restored to her 1920s glory, including original teak on the main deck and a revived Tiffany-designed interior.

'Talitha' (247 Feet) 1929, Germany

Talitha is one of the world’s first superyachts with an exceptional pedigree. F. Krupp built the vessel, which was originally penned by naval architects Cox & Stevens (leading designers of their day), in Kiel, Germany. First known as Reveler , Talitha was delivered in 1929 to Russell Algar, chairman of the Packard Car Company. A string of high-profile owners ensued, including John Paul Getty Jr. in the 1930s, son of one of the richest men in the world at the time. Getty commissioned an exterior and interior redesign by late superyacht designer Jon Bannenberg and, in 1993, a full reconstruction was completed at the Devonport shipyard in Plymouth, U.K. Regular refits since, including a 1999 newly installed wheelhouse, has made Talitha successful as a popular charter yacht.

' Malahne' (164 feet) 1937/2015, UK

Originally designed and built for the owner of renowned J-Class yacht Velsheda , classic motor yacht  Malahne enjoys a period interior designed by Scottish designer Guy Oliver (best known for styling London’s 10 Downing Street and Claridge’s). Original Art Deco features include Baccarat crystal, Willer porcelain, Georg Jensen silverware, and a lamp by 1930s designer Edgar Brandt. The yacht was once used as the production headquarters for Lawrence of Arabia and had luminaries such as Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra walking the teak decks. In 2015, it underwent an extensive restoration at British shipyard Pendennis, which focused on maintaining its old-world glamour, including the yacht’s 25-foot custom-built Cockwells varnished Brazilian mahogany high-speed tender.

'Savarona' (446 Feet 9 Inches) 1931, Germany

Launched in 1931, Savarona was built for an heiress, enjoyed by royalty, and starred on the big screen. Built by Blohm & Voss for Emily Roebling Cadwalader, granddaughter of Brooklyn Bridge engineer John Roebling, 446-foot Savarona was featured in the German science-fiction film Gold . The Turkish government bought the vessel in 1938 and leased to Turkish businessman Kahraman Sadıkoğlu in 1989, who spent $45 million refurbishing the yacht. The original steam turbine engines were replaced with modern Caterpillar diesels, but the original 282-foot gold-trimmed staircase remains. Today, Savarona is the official presidential yacht of the Republic of Turkey.

'Shemara' (212 Feet, 2 Inches) 1938, Great Britain

Within a year of being built in 1938, 212-foot Shemara was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and used throughout World War II as a training vessel for anti-submarine warfare. Following the end of its service, the superyacht returned to her owner Bernard Docker, who entertained high society aboard its decks. Later in life, Shemara endured long periods of neglect until current owner Charles Dunstone acquired her in 2010, starting the long road back to refurbishment. Alongside much of the original teak and steel exterior features, Shemara is now fitted with a Rolls-Royce diesel-electric system, including two electrically driven azimuthing pods and a bow thruster.

'Christina O' (325 Feet) 1943/1954

Possibly one of the most eminent superyachts of all time, 325-foot Christina O didn’t begin life in the spotlight. Built in 1943 by Canadian Vickers, the vessel served as a frigate in World War II until 1954 when Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis bought it as war surplus for a mere $34,000. He spent $4 million on the refurbishment and then entertained the world’s elite on board, from Maria Callas and Grace Kelly to Jack and Jackie Kennedy, prior to Onassis marrying Jackie. Named after Aristotle’s daughter, Christina O enjoys a bronze-edged swimming pool with a mosaic dance floor that rises at the push of a button. The stools in Ari’s Bar retain the original leather upholstery.

'V2V' (ex-Carinthia VI) (137 feet, 7 inches) 1973, Germany

The first major yacht designed by Jon Bannenberg and a breakthrough build for German shipyard Lürssen, Carinthia VI is a star of the decades, commissioned by supermarket magnate Helmut Horten as the sixth yacht in his Carinthia fleet. However, Carinthia V was in fact the original version but sadly hit an uncharted rock on her maiden cruise in the Mediterranean and sank. Horten ordered an almost identical replacement (this time with extra watertight bulkheads) and used Carinthia VI until his death in 1987. In 2016, the yacht suffered severe damage in a fire. Its new owner then bought the yacht, undergoing an extensive rebuild in Turkey to its original Bannenberg lines that was completed in 2023 when the yacht was renamed V2V.

'La Sultana' (214 Feet 56 Inches) 1962, Bulgaria

A Bulgarian passenger ferry turned Soviet spy vessel, 214.5-foot La Sultana has a checkered past. Built in 1962 for operations in the Black Sea, it was absorbed into the Russian fleet during the Cold War and sent to the North Atlantic for unofficial reconnaissance on the United States and United Kingdom. In 2015, La Sultana  completed a seven-year refit, which saw the addition of a raised bow, seven guest cabins across six decks, and a diesel engine installed to drive the original propeller. Several spying instruments were also discovered, including a radioactivity detector and thick aluminum insulation across the entire boat. The original push button steering controls are still in operation.

'Highlander' (164 Feet) 1986, Netherlands

American media mogul Malcolm Forbes commissioned the 164-foot Highlander , built by Feadship to a Jon Bannenberg design with De Voogt naval architecture, in 1986. The yacht’s historic guest list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stars, from Elizabeth Taylor to Robert De Niro. Two bathrooms in the master suite are offset by six guest cabins. Those lucky enough to charter this piece of yachting history also have use of Forbes’s original cigarette boat, now re-painted in jet black with a bold red stripe.

'Tatoosh' (303 feet) 2000, Germany

Built by Nobiskrug for cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, the 303-foot Tatoosh was more famously owned by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who bought the yacht off McCaw in 2001. Penned by German designer Claus Kusch—with input over the years from Jon Bannenberg, Terence Disdale, Martin Francis, and Stefano Pastrovich— Tatoosh is arguably one of the foremost explorer yachts of the modern age. The vessel was conceived to be a world cruiser with all the toys and entertainment that a yacht could carry. Alongside two helicopter landing pads, it has 11 staterooms for 19 guests, a heated swimming pool with a lifting floor, a cinema, and a dive center with a nitrox refilling station for deeper dives.

'Al Salamah' (456 Feet 10 Inches) 1999, Germany

At the time of its construction in 1999, 456-foot Al Salamah was the third largest yacht in the world. The build began at German yard HDW in Kiel but was completed by Lürssen in Bremen, the only yacht builder at the time capable of meeting the owner’s demanding timeline. Al Salamah was commissioned by the late Saudi Arabian crown prince Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. Estimated to be worth in the region of $200 million and accommodating 36 guests, the ample amenities include a cinema, a fully equipped onboard hospital, two full-time beauticians, a business center, and a spa.

'H' (ex-NEOM) (311 feet) 2000, Netherlands

Delivered in 2000, the 311-foot  H   remained the largest Oceanco yet built and the largest yacht built in Holland until the delivery of Kaos (ex- Jubilee ) in 2017. Originally named Al Mirqab , the vessel was a highly private yacht under the ownership of the Qatar royal family before ex-politician and co-owner of Formula One Force India team Vijay Vittal Mallya took ownership in 2006. The Maltese government seized the lavishly outfitted yacht, which includes a helipad large enough for a twin-engine helicopter, Elton John’s baby grand piano, a full medical suite, and triple engines each delivering 10,000 hp, in 2017 over unpaid maritime bills. NEOM was auctioned off to her current owner in 2018.

'Rising Sun' (453 Feet) 2004, Germany

Built for Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison in 2004 and currently owned by business mogul David Geffen, Lürssen’s Rising Sun is another Jon Bannenberg success story, completed two years after the designer’s death. Even with her 453-foot length and 7,841-gross tonnes volume, Rising Sun achieves an impressive top speed of 28 knots. The owners were impressed enough with the speed to build a suspended, tube-like walkway so visitors can see the four MTU 20V 8000 M90 diesel engines providing the power. A bank of full-height curved windows run along the entire length of the superstructure, flooding the interior with natural light and giving the yacht a striking exterior profile.

'Motor Yacht A' (390 feet, 4 inches) 2008, Germany

Few yachts divide opinion like M/Y A . Designed by Philippe Starck, engineered by naval architect Martin Francis, and built by Blohm + Voss, the yacht is rumored to have cost in the region of $300 million to bring to life. Characterized by its head-turning reverse bow and vertical superstructure, the vessel is a private floating fortress where guests’ access to the water is restricted to the stern. It boasts a cathedral-like tender garage and three swimming pools; it’s also the predecessor to the even more controversial S/Y A , which emerged nine years later and briefly held the place of world’s largest sailing yacht before being displaced by Koru.

'Dubai' (531 Feet 5 Inches) 2006, Germany

Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei first commissioned Dubai in 1995 to be built in collaboration by German shipyards Blohm + Voss and Lürssen. But the superyacht was not completed until 2001 by Platinum Yachts when current owner, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, took over the project. British studio Winch Design crafted the exterior, and the vessel is reported to have cost in the region of $400 million to build. Dubai  was the largest yacht in the world until 2010, when she was replaced by Roman Abramovich’s 533-foot Eclipse . Dubai ’s amenities, spread across eight decks, include a helipad, two 33-foot chase boats, a squash court, and 20 Jet Skis.

'Savannah' (273 feet, 11 inches) 2015, Netherlands

Savannah is renowned for being the first hybrid yacht on water, with fuel savings of up to 30 percent. It blends a single diesel engine with three gensets, batteries, a propeller, and an azimuting pioneering electro-mechanical propulsion platform. Built by Feadship, the yacht’s 41-foot beam was such a tight fit for the Dutch canals during delivery that the builder wrapped her in protective film and used plywood on the sides to serve as fenders. With its interior and exterior designed by Cristina Gherardi Benardeau, the yacht was also ahead of its time, with a corridor of double-height video walls, a floating superstructure, and an underwater Nemo lounge.

'Maltese Falcon' (289 Feet) 2006, Turkey

The legendary Maltese Falcon broke the mold of yacht design when launched in 2006. Perini Navi’s 289-foot, three-masted schooner was the result of its adventurous owner, the late Tom Perkins, and naval architect Gerard Dykstra’s radical design idea. The show-stopping Dynarig concept, now coined the Falcon Rig, catapulted Maltese Falcon to becoming the world’s most instantly recognized yacht, not to mention one of the most complex and largest sailing vessels ever built. The contemporary, computer-controlled sail system is based on freestanding carbon masts and yard-arms into which the sails furl. This system allows for easy sailing in all sea conditions. Famous charterers include Tom Hanks, Hugh Jackman, and Google cofounder Larry Page.

'Eclipse' (533 Feet) 2009, Germany

Aside from stealing the title of world’s largest yacht from 531-foot Dubai by a mere 1.5 feet, Eclipse is an exercise in amenities. Delivered to her owner Roman Abramovich in 2009, the vessel features a 52-foot swimming pool within an extensive beach club, two helipads, and a helicopter hangar under the foredeck. The 533-foot yacht is powered by a diesel-electric system driving azimuthing pods, one of the first of its kind. Eclipse retained the title of world’s largest yacht until the arrival of 590.5-foot Azzam in 2013. Designed inside and out by Terence Disdale, Eclipse took five years to build and is reported to have cost in the region of $590 million.

'Chopi Chopi' (262 Feet) 2013, Italy

Tasked with an experienced owner’s brief for a private yacht on which to spend long family holidays, CRN delivered with  Chopi Chopi . The largest yacht built by CRN at the time of her 2013 launch, the 262-foot Chopi Chopi remains the Italian yard’s flagship. A 656-square-foot owner’s suite with private terrace is complemented by a helipad capable of landing a three-ton helicopter. The interior ceiling heights are in excess of seven feet. But the focus of the design is on comfortable outdoor living, realized by a large beach club with an adjoining sauna, hammam, and spa with a treatment room.

'Azzam' (590 Feet) 2013, Germany

At a whopping 590-foot, Azzam has held the title of world’s largest yacht since her launch in 2013. Azzam was built by German yard Lürssen in a record three years for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the current President of the United Arab Emirates. Alongside a 95-foot main saloon, Azzam carries a submarine and its own missile defense system. Two gas turbines and two diesel engines propel the yacht through the water more than 32 knots.

'Black Pearl' (350 Feet) 2018, Netherlands

Delivered by Oceanco in 2018, the 350-foot Black Pearl is only the second yacht in the world to be fitted with Dykstra’s DynaRig carbon masts and sailing system. Its eye-catching black sails span 9,514 square feet and can be set in a record seven minutes with the push of a button. The hybrid propulsion system combines wind power with two electric propulsion motors, and its controllable pitch propellers generate enough energy to support the yacht’s hotel load. A waste heat-recovery system is just one of the onboard features that helps to realize the owner’s vision of a “zero-impact” yacht.

'Excellence' (262 Feet) 2019, Germany

Built for an experienced serial owner, American automobile magnate Herb Chambers, the Winch-designed 262-foot Excellence was delivered in 2019. The vessel takes its design inspiration from Motor Yacht A , which Chambers at first didn’t care for but then began to love. The piercing reverse bow (that mimics the beak of an American eagle) and triple-height glass-fronted atrium give it curb appeal but has also led to the yacht being likened to a spaceship. Driven by the desire to have a connection to the outdoors, the design rests upon a symbiotic relation between the indoors and out and was ultimately successful, partially due to the use hundreds of square feet of curved, mirrored glass panels.

'Koru' (417 feet) 2023, Netherlands

Oceanco’s 417-foot Koru , commissioned by Jeff Bezos, is a three-masted, black-hulled schooner with a bowsprit, classic lines, and white superstructure. Reportedly costing $450 million to build and accompanied by a 246-foot custom Damen support yacht  Wingman , the new vessel is the world’s largest sailing yacht (knocking S/Y A off the top spot). Koru also holds the title of the largest superyacht ever built in the Netherlands and the tallest sailing yacht in the world, with masts that measure over 230 feet.

'Obsidian' (417 feet) 2023, Netherlands

Feadship’s 2023 delivery Obsidian has the appearance of a spaceship. But the boat’s technically advanced propulsion package, described as having a 90 percent reduction in total CO2 emissions, is what places it on this list, carrying the Dutch builder one step closer to its goal of achieving a zero-emission superyacht by 2030. The hybrid diesel-electric system is designed into a single-floor engine room creating additional interior space for owners, guests, and crew. With no drive shafts or rudders, the steering is done through a pair of electric Veth contrarotating thrusters. The diesel generators will also run on HVO, a second-generation biodiesel that manufacturers describe as a net-zero CO2 fuel. A low profile, horizontal styling features, and clean exterior shapes are a preamble for the yacht’s interior, which includes an underwater observation area—known as the Aqua Lounge.

'Luminance' (417 feet) 2023, Germany

Delivered in late 2023, Lürssen’s eighth largest build, Luminance , ranks as the 12th largest yacht in the world and is the 30th yacht built by the German shipyard with an exterior design by Espen Øino. The six-deck behemoth is one of the most significant yachts to be launched this year, with an internal volume of 9,000 GT, a beam of 66 feet, and an interior by Francois Zuretti. The gigayacht features two helipads, two Jacuzzis, a large swimming pool, and a distinctive stretched bow.

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Parent item expand the sub menu, canada goose reduces corporate workforce, samuel gui yang leads chinese style movement, moore from l.a.: pierpaolo piccioli’s legacy at valentino, private yachts 101: an insider’s guide for guests.

The Baron Louis J. Esterhazy, of the Hungarian Esterhazys, gives tips on how a guest should behave when invited to sail the seas on a private yacht.

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Editor’s Note: The Hungarian Countess Louise J. Esterhazy was a revered — and feared — chronicler of the highs — and generally lows — of fashion, society, culture and more. Over the course of several decades (although she never really counted and firmly avoided any reference to her age), the Countess penned her missives from her pied-à-terres in Manhattan, Nantucket, Paris, London and Gstaad, as well as wherever her travels took her, from California to Morocco.

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Food, fun and more to see in paris this fashion week, under the skin of théo mercier.

As summer winds languidly down to the end of August, one’s thoughts turn to that last possible summer vacation.

In times past the Esterhazy clan descended in fleets of gilded horse-drawn carriages to our lakeside palace of Szigliget. Puzzlingly, modern life doesn’t allow such privileges now…but being an Esterhazy still has its little perks, as over the summer months my email in-box fills with tempting invitations to join various modern-day commercial princelings on an array of magnificent yachts, all gliding around the Mediterranean Sea.

Ever since American robber barons and the English aristocracy discovered the joys of yachting (now so blatantly adopted by fashion designers, Hollywood celebrities and luxury titans), “the Med” has been the place to be in July and August.…from Salvador Dali’s Cadaqués in northeast Spain, across Coco Chanel’s French Riviera, Columbus’ Ligurian and Hemingway’s Amalfi coasts, disco throbbing Ibiza, the more poetic Mallorca, the Aga Khan’s Sardinia, Bonaparte’s Corsica, the Odyssean Ionian and Icarian Aegean seas, all the way to ancient Antalya, in southern Turkey. There are thousands of miles of idyllic European coastline and one hundred times as many Instagramable bays and inlets where one can drop anchor, launch the sea-toys and behave like a spoiled tycoon.

And, believe me, these days for every bay, there are a dozen white, blue and gray-hulled throbbing monster machines providing entertainment and luxury beyond one’s wildest dreams to those aboard (and paparazzi-filled motorboats chasing the celebrity-filled ones). By the way, proper sailing yachts are few and far between, as real sailing is too much like a sport, involves a modicum of skill, some real passion and even potential discomfort.

In addition to all this at sea, if one’s host is really aiming to impress and “go large,” your invitation may well include a private jet trip out to join the gin-palace at anchor. It all sounds so “Life Styles of the Rich & Famous” and jealous-making, doesn’t it?  

1) Large yachts are not a home. No homeowner gets upset at being in residence alone — with hallways of empty guest rooms upstairs. No, big fancy yachts are solely designed to impress, entertain and to be filled. A yacht owner “on board alone” is a deeply sad character. So, they need to fill the multiple guest cabins — for the entire summer season. The challenge is, all their rich friends also have their own mega-yachts and gorgeous summer retreats and they, too, need guests.

So, when you get the tempting yachting invitation, beware that accompanying noise, which is the unmistakable sound of the bottom of a large barrel being scraped in search of warm bodies to fill empty cabins. The point is, you could well be trapped on a boat, with up to a dozen other utterly random people, all quietly wondering to themselves why they were asked and when the holiday will end.

I once met a charming couple who were about to spend 10 days on the enormous yacht of a well-known European tech tycoon. The invitation had come after meeting him only once at a London charity soirée. I casually told them that, of course, every cabin was wired with listening devices and every mirror was two-way with cameras behind, as the owner relished sitting in his cabin late at night eavesdropping and watching his guests. They were horrified.

I saw them six months later. “How was the cruise in the Med?” I asked. “Terrible! We undressed in the closet, never had any physical interaction and only spoke when we had swum 200 yards from the boat. It was ghastly.” “Why?” I innocently asked. “Because of what you told us about all the bugging.” “God Lord, that was a joke!”

I have not seen them since.

3) To support and enable this near psychotic level of control-freakery, your host is ably and ruthlessly supported by the crew of whatever mode of transport you are enjoying. Private jet and big yacht crews are singularly the most disciplined, attentive, willing and fastidious domestic staff in existence. They make Downton Abbey’s Carson look like a trainee on amateur night. If the  owner wants his guests to water ski at 2 a.m. or be served iced tequila shots while attempting stand-up paddle, it’s done. No request or need is too much for these people. The corollary pleasure of all this pampering, as a guest, is when you finally leave, the expected tip for the crew is enough to pay a full term at Yale Law School. Bring enough cash to fill a private banker’s till.

4) And talking of leaving, again like jail, the process of release is always in someone else’s hands. You may have boarded in Nice and reasonably have bought yourself a return flight home from the same airport. Big mistake. One week later, you could be approaching any number of unexpected ports with a range of challenging travel connections back to Paris, London, Geneva or New York. But all this is simply not a concern or something even understood by your host. When one has a private jet on call, why would you bother to understand the concerns of mortals around budget airlines, seat availability and flight schedules? Suddenly, you are dumped out on a Greek rock and soon find yourself ferrying it back to Athens with countless unwashed back- packers. And then you feel how the real world returns, alarmingly fast.

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “ A SUPERYACHT IS A TERRIBLE ASSET ,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

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In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include IMAX theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that!  ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

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Stories and adventures from the movers and shakers in the world of yachting, we go behind the scenes with the people who make it happen and the individuals committed to driving change. 

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The Best Private Yacht Charters for Small Groups

By Fran Golden

All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

While much of the cruise industry halted operations in the last year , it didn't mean that all sailings stopped. For families or pandemic-era bubble groups who wanted a sunny getaway on the water, a trend emerged: renting out entire yachts , complete with crew, for a new kind of custom sailing.

Exploring destinations around the world on a private yacht with your kids, and maybe another family or two, is both a luxurious and practical way to travel these days. The sea turns into your personal playground, and your captain will steer you to islets and beaches away from the crowds. On board, you can spend time together in a pleasant, contained environment—plus, no one has to cook. Bring on the movies and board games!

Here are our favorite family-friendly yachts available for private charter around the world.

All listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you book something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Kontiki Wayra

Howler monkeys, sea lions, and blue-footed boobies are one attraction, pristine beaches another as this new 128-foot motor yacht, operated by the sustainably conscious expedition line Kontiki, explores less-touristed areas on the coast of Ecuador beginning this summer. The nine-cabin yacht carries up to 18 guests in contemporary high-style. The 10-member crew includes local guides, a chef, and wellness professionals—there's even a masseuse on board. On land, visit nature preserves and treat the kids to a private tasting of Ecuadorian chocolate.

Book now : From $152,800 per week

Halcon del Mar

Explore the coast of Turkey on this high-end, 148-foot traditional Bodrum-style gulet , with a classic mahogany interior and crew of six. The schooner sleeps up to 16 guests in eight spacious cabins. Enjoy the Jacuzzi and water toys—jet skis, water skis, snorkeling equipment, wakeboards, a canoe, paddleboards, a banana boat. Everyone can dine together at an open-air table at the stern, then watch movies in the saloon. Not-to-miss spots on the Gulf of Göcek include the protected Iztuzu Beach, where turtles nest.

Book now : $57,500 to $75,000 per week , plus food and drink

Prana by Atzaró's Batavia master suite.

Prana by Atzaró

The world’s largest Indonesian phinisi yacht explores remote islands, such as Komodo National Park (home to the famous dragons) and Raja Ampat . Made of teak, the 180-foot, Spanish-owned luxury yacht has nine cabins across four decks—plenty of room for fussy teens to have their own space. Luxuriate on daybeds, hang out on beaches, and snorkel or dive in the region’s famous coral reefs . The 20-person crew includes a cruise director, dive instructor, chefs, and masseuses. Water skis, wakeboards, and towable floats will thrill the kids.

Book now : From $15,000 to $17,500 per day , four-night minimum 

HMS Gåssten

Family groups of up to 10 will frolic under the Midnight Sun in Norway’s sparsely populated western fjords on this funky wooden boat, which started life as a Swedish Navy minesweeper. A meticulous rehab includes an oak-paneled saloon for dining, lounging, and board games. Perfect for kids, two of the five cabins have bunk beds. You can swim off the bow deck (where a gun turret once was located), as well as hike, bike, paddleboard, kayak, and fish during your stay.

Book now : From $54,204 per week  

This 78-foot yacht cruises Alaska’s tidewater , the glacier-rich Prince William Sound. Customized itineraries include Captain Jeff Gorton’s favorite spots for berry picking and hiking; watching glaciers calve; and spotting killer whales, Stellar sea lions, and frolicking otters. Get up close to the shoreline on the yacht’s kayaks and paddleboards. Three suites (one with bunk beds) accommodate six. In the spacious main salon, the private chef will prepare for dinner shrimp you caught that day.

Book now : $9,900 per night , three-night minimum

I Sea 's amenities include a floating swimming pool and a sky lounge.

Cruising the Greek Isles on this 134-foot superyacht brings luxury touches adults will appreciate, such as a master suite with private balcony on the Bridge deck. The waterslide will get the kids’ attention; it runs from the top deck to the sea. Great amenities include a floating swimming pool, banana boat, and snorkeling and diving equipment for two. Onboard are a Jacuzzi and a main salon for watching movies on TVs, plus a sky lounge. A crew of six caters to up to 10 guests in five cabins.

Book now : $156,000 to $178,000 per week

Metsuyan IV

A 3D outdoor cinema and 13-foot diving board for jumping into the sea are among the cool features on this sleek, 10-guest, five-cabin superyacht, available for cruising Croatia and Montenegro—including stops at gorgeous white-sand beaches. Onboard are a spa pool and a crow’s nest where kids may play pirate when not competing on the PlayStation 3, or using a provided easel and art supplies. Parents of younger kids will like the two forward staterooms with a connecting door.

Book now : $118,00 to $138,000 per week

Moorings 5000

This contemporary catamaran can be crew-chartered, with captain and chef, for up to eight guests in St. Thomas, for cruising the U.S. Virgin Islands. Visit popular Trunk Bay, then snorkel with sea turtles in Christmas Cove and look for dolphins in Leinster Bay. Toys include water skis, kneeboards, and a draggable inflatable tube. Hang out on beanbags or on the “trampoline” between the catamaran’s two hulls. Indoors, a TV/DVD player is set for movie nights in the expansive saloon.

Book now : From $21,479 per week

This is part of a series on rethinking private travel , which explores how the pandemic has changed our approach to private travel and made it more accessible to all.

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The World's Largest Private Residence Superyacht: 222m Somnio

By Freya Cottrell

Tillberg Design of Sweden, in collaboration with Winch Design, are daring to dream as they are appointed lead architect for master planning and interior concepts for the world’s largest private residence superyacht, Somnio.

From the latin ‘to dream’, Somnio has been dubbed within the industry as the first “Yacht Liner” due to its incredible 222m length. Featuring 39 onboard apartments Somnio will be the world’s largest private residence superyacht. Working in close collaboration with Winch Design, Tillberg Design of Sweden is more than delighted to be trusted with the designing of this luxury superyacht. 

Daniel Nerhagen, Tillberg Design of Sweden Partner and Yacht Director, says: "Somnio can be seen as an evolution of two industries coming together. In this project, we merge the best of these worlds. The commercial build process for efficiency in combination with design, quality and craftsmanship from the superyacht industry. Yachts have grown bigger and bigger, and I see shared knowledge and hybrid projects as a natural step for the industry in the coming years. All of this gives the owners the best value for their investment."

The design of the yacht has been developed, alongside a client team, with optimal flows, and impeccable tailored layouts, the purpose of which is to enhance the guest experience and crew operations throughout the yacht. In order to emulate the authentic yachting ambiance inside the vessel, the interior of the yacht has been designed using materials such as crafted wood, elegant leather and exclusively designed textiles.

Fredrik Johansson, Tillberg Design of Sweden Partner and Executive Director says, "It really is a unique project, and the level of ambition from the stakeholders is truly exceptional. We are applying all the combined experience we have from our work within private yachts, effective master planning of large vessels, as well as our deep understanding of residential life at sea. The outcome will be like nothing else that exists today; it will be dream-like. The way the yacht is planned and equipped, and the interior and exterior design, together with the standard of outfitting, will make it as close to living on a private yacht that you can get without buying one of your own.”

The itinerary of this behemoth superyacht is just about as monumental as the yacht itself. With plans to explore all corners of the globe including: cruising the Mediterranean, crossing to New York, sailing the South Pacific and undertaking expeditions in Antarctica. 

When the yacht liner has reached completion in mid-2024, the amenities onboard will be spectacular and will include: a 10,000 bottle wine cellar, fine-dining restaurants and bars, and an onboard beach club with water sports facilities to name a few.

A number of different apartments, sizes and layouts have been developed for Somnio through the designing processes and all 39 are already being sold. Obtention of said apartments is being kept strictly private and is entirely invitation or referral based. The names of the owners of the world’s largest private residential superyacht are also being held strictly underwraps and will reportedly remain as such.

"Somnio can be seen as an evolution of two industries coming together. In this project, we merge the best of these worlds. The commercial build process for efficiency in combination with design, quality and craftmanship from the superyacht industry." Daniel Nerhagen, TDoS Partner and Yacht Director

"Somnio can be seen as an evolution of two industries coming together. In this project, we merge the best of these worlds. The commercial build process for efficiency in combination with design, quality and craftmanship from the superyacht industry."

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The world’s largest private residential yacht: A journey of health and wellness

It is easy to live well on board the 196-metre The World , Residences at Sea . The entire vessel has been curated around providing its residents with not just means to explore the world in luxury, but to align their health and wellness goals with the wonder of non-stop, global exploration – all from the comfort of their own home at sea.

The international community of residents share many common interests, particularly travel and fitness, and the range of facilities and activities reflect this. There are so many options, residents have the choice to learn something new or perfect what they already know. Life on board The World is invigorating to say the least, and here are just some of the ways the world’s largest privately-owned residential yacht supports its community’s quest for wellness.

The Fitness Center

Hailed as one of the most popular areas on the vessel, it seems apt that any resident’s first stop should be to the Fitness Center, open 24/7. To start the day feeling energised after a good night’s sleep, there are Pilates and yoga classes instructed by The World ’s professional trainers. The classes are catered to all levels, and great care is taken in ensuring that the wide range of equipment, studios, routines, atmosphere and refreshments are of the highest quality and suitable for all.

The World holds the title for the only regulation-sized tennis court at sea, which is also perfect for cricket matches and basketball games. Plus, there’s always the yacht’s personal trainers around to fashion a custom-made routine for any resident who enjoys coaching or independent workouts.

To wind down and iron out any areas of tension, there’s a qualified team of experienced massage therapists and physiotherapists on hand. These physios work directly with The World ’s onboard doctors and fitness instructors for various treatments and therapeutic rehabilitation. If a resident requires a physiotherapy programme, it is personalised to reflect the resident’s wellbeing, diet and lifestyle.

Shoreside fitness

Myriad activities are available to residents and guests when the ship is in port to support their wellness journey while exploring the most amazing destinations on earth. Fitness regimes are anything but routine for those who opt to explore the local towns by foot, like a walking tour of the World Heritage Site of Marrakech. Others may prefer to discover the area by bike with a cycling tour through Vancouver’s natural landscapes or hike Athens’ ruins to stay fit.

The food and beverage team

Extraordinary culinary experiences are an essential part of life on board The World . While residents can cook at home with ingredients from the onboard gourmet marketplace, purchased during a fun outing to a local farmers market, or with a private chef, the vessel’s six restaurants provide an endless array of eating options. The World ’s chefs go above and beyond to create five-star menus with healthy choices including fresh, locally sourced ingredients. Embracing the distinct flavours of the destination through food and wine further enhances the cultural experience.

The vessel’s four main restaurants specialise in eclectic Asian cuisine, steaks and seafood, Michelin-star level fine dining and Mediterranean flavours. For those seeking the perfect beverage, residents can find numerous cocktail lounges and bars across the vessel. Plus, there’s an extensive and award-winning wine and sake list of over 1,200 wines hand-picked from 20 countries. All this is stored in The World ’s impressive wine cellar that holds over 16,000 bottles.

With so much spectacular food and drink to choose from, The World ’s food and beverage team can tailor a meal programme that supports a resident’s nutritional goals regardless of where on the ship the meal is enjoyed or wherever the vessel happens to be sailing the globe.

The World Spa

Taking over a huge 2,133 square metres of space on board the yacht, The World Spa offers the ultimate menu of skincare, hair and body treatments to enhance the residents’ health and wellness programme. Unique offerings include multi-wave LED light therapy for anti-ageing and pain management, an innovative Vichy bed for enhanced full-body hammam treatments, NanoVi® human cell repair therapy, CACI non-surgical facelift system, Zerona Z6 non-invasive laser and more.

A dip in the yacht’s two swimming pools is always an option for residents. For those who would prefer to stay feeling serene and relaxed, the Cleopatra Heated Beds come with a zero-gravity effect and apply heat therapy similar to a hot stone massage.

Hobbies and activities

Even for the most well-travelled and cultured of residents, there are still new things to try. Whether it be food, drink, sports or cultural activities, The World has all the facilities, equipment and expert trainers on hand to make it easy to try something new.

While some residents are a dab-hand at golf, others plan to improve their game. The onboard pros are ready to teach, either in a private lesson or offering expert input at the simulator. For a more relaxed session, there’s the golf putting greens, chipping areas and a driving range. Other energizing activities include paddleboard, SCUBA diving like to Saipan’s limestone Grotto or snorkelling adventures to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

A small selection of homes on board The World, Residences at Sea are available for resale every year. To learn more about ownership opportunities and the unique residential lifestyle of this one-of-a-kind mega yacht, contact The World ’s Residential Advisor by calling +1 954 538 8449 / +44 20 7 572 1231 or clicking here. For more information visit aboardtheworld.com .

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Crew Culture: Private Vs Charter Yachts

There’s a long-standing myth in yachting that working on a charter yacht equates to seeing the world on a bumped up salary in a party atmosphere while a private vessel spells a slower pace of life in a lower octane environment.

As anyone who works in the industry knows, however, it’s a lot more nuanced than that. In fact, the traditional thinking that crew are either ‘charter or private’ has given way to a much more fluid scenario – and as a result, culture has evolved too.

It’s not about being a chameleon as authenticity is embraced and encouraged over and above the need to make yourself fit.

Crew-Glue Managing Partner Sara Ballinger advises a flexible approach for a rewarding career in either context. “Authenticity is preferable to having multiple personas to suit whoever you happen to be talking to,” she says. “It’s about adapting your style, not your personality.

“If you’re someone with a full on, extrovert and fiery personality and your captain is more thoughtful and detail oriented, bounding onto the bridge unannounced and bombarding them with your latest idea might take them aback.

“Better to be more self-aware, temper your style, tone it down, ask for a few minutes of their time and then hit them with all that energy! That’s flexible, but not inauthentic.”

Luxury Hospitality’s Peter Vogel, a former fleet hospitality and event manager, advises a less superficial approach in the recruitment process in order to find crew who are the right fit whether the yacht is for charter or private use. “If you hire because people are pretty, you will roll into issues as you are not hiring with a view to a proper job fit.”

He also advocates the idea of treating every yacht as a business, adding: “Commercial or charter vessels are driven by a financial perspective. The purpose is to make money, and while running a private family yacht is different, if you still run it as a business, things become easier and more aligned. More owners are now talking that language and there has been an evolution in attitude.”

It’s wise for green crew to be wary of the perceived wisdom attached to charter and private craft, particularly as the fantasy often bears scant resemblance to the reality.

“Charter yachts are regarded as a fast-paced and exciting albeit demanding working environment,” says Luxury Hospitality’s Insight specialist Lynne Edwards, a former interior manager. “The sheer volume of work and long hours can be hugely underestimated by green crew until they actually experience it – and it doesn’t suit everyone!

“Green crew who believe it’s an opportunity to see the world can be disappointed when they experience it only from the deck or through a porthole, with the exception of a rare night or two off.”

Crew retention can also be worse on charters, despite the incentive of substantial gratuities. “Burnout is rife, particularly on yachts which operate double seasons in the Med then the Caribbean or elsewhere,” adds Lynne.

“When people are exhausted and lacking in sleep, their tolerance levels drop, they start missing family and friends more and disengagement and friction sets in, aside from physical and emotional breakdowns.”

Peter agrees, adding: “On charter, there’s a lot of energy needing to be pumped out so you need creative, bubbly personalities who are willing to go for it and not think about ‘me’ time.”

Conversely, private yachts have long possessed the reputation for being a safer, less eventful, perhaps more boring bet.

“There are times when it can feel boring, just maintaining the vessel for an owner who may or may not get on for a boss trip,’ admits Sara. ‘Although there is still plenty to do, it doesn’t have the same sense of purpose and energy when you are going nowhere and serving no-one. Boredom and lack of enthusiasm can kick in.”

There’s no doubt that often, a charter will be a more stressful environment, especially for younger crew members. “The culture on a charter yacht is intense”, adds LH’s Emily Coates, a former first officer. “Tasks are done faster, stress levels are higher, crew celebrations after the charter are louder and the lows are lower. The work is focused around shorter deadlines and trying to achieve the wow factor to receive the best gratuity possible.

“There is less need to wow on a private yacht because the owner has seen it all before – and likes it - so there is less deviating from the script. The culture on the whole is calm and stable because there are more rest days and more time between trips.”

Lynne concurs, adding that private yachts often retain their team long term as they remain in port for long periods, making them an ideal choice for older crew for whom home life is as important as their yachting career.

“Privately owned yachts generally provide a more measured working environment unless the owner is an avid, perpetual entertainer of guests,’ says Lynne. ‘Crew can familiarise themselves with the owner’s needs and preferences but the fact remains that most owners, whether they charter their yacht or not, prefer to see the same faces when they spend time aboard.”

Talitha G Captain Giles Sangster has noticed increasing crew traffic between charter and private vessels, adding: ‘There is this myth that charter is busier and full of hidden riches whereas private is slower paced and lower paid but it depends entirely on the yacht.

“Charter is more intense and unknown. There is a steep learning curve in the first few days. If everything goes to plan, that will likely continue but when it doesn’t, it’s very difficult to pull ahead. You have to get creative and try new tactics.

“On a private/repeat charter trip, you know your client and you’re well prepared in terms of what to give and what to expect regarding routine, mealtimes and family preferences. However, an owner trip can be far busier than any charter trip based on the owner knowing what the yacht and crew are capable of.”

Sara can see why the charter/private myths have taken root. “I sometimes wonder if those for whom a more temporary style of employment, which creates more wealth but ‘is not forever,’ prefer charter while career yachties looking for security might prefer private,” she ponders. “I know many friends who love working on private yachts so it really depends on what you want from the job.”

With that in mind, Crew-Glue’s approach to team building and development combined with LH’s 360 training approach - which uses personality profiling to improve self-knowledge and self-awareness – exists to help crew understand their strengths and their purpose so they are better equipped to make the right job choice and be happy.

Lynne confirms: “Quite simply, it gives all crew the tools to rise to – and overcome – the challenges of even the most exacting situations.”

Images: Mark O'Connell

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Private yachts, occasional wife-swapping and over-the-counter Ozempic: the secret lives of expats

A s a new Amazon Prime series sheds light on the frequently glamorous, often claustrophobic and sometimes salacious expat lifestyle, five émigrés recount their own adventures in Hong Kong, Dubai, Australia, France and southern Africa.

Hong Kong: ‘Life for many revolves around private yachts and supercars – plus occasional wife-swapping’

Harbour view apartments. Boozy brunches. Weekend boat trips. Parties at The Peninsula. Private schools and live-in helpers. This is the life of Hong Kong ’s affluent émigrés, according to excerpts of Lulu Wang’s new series Expats, starring Nicole Kidman – the mere mention of which is currently sending Hong Kong’s social media channels into a frenzy. That fury is not only due to concerns the series will gloss over the harrowing political crackdown of recent years, but because we’re all still livid that Kidman was given a quarantine exception for filming in August 2021 – a time when Hong Kong citizens were subject to prohibitively expensive three-week long hotel quarantines as part of the city’s draconian Covid restrictions.  

Setting our chagrin aside, just who are the expats Wang has set out to portray? In British colonial times they were called FILTH – Failed in London, Try Hong Kong – but that’s always been a bit of a cliché. Hong Kong’s expat community dates back to the 1800s and includes people of all nationalities – a Parsee cook established the Star Ferry; Mizahi Jews from Iraq built The Peninsula – and come from all walks of life. That includes my father, a professional football player for Glasgow Rangers who swept our family into Kai Tak Airport in 1974. Later, I went to school with “expat brats” from Thailand, New Zealand, France, Canada, Japan, India, Australia and Malaysia – this is one aspect of life which Wang seems to get right, with a multi-racial cast that includes Americans of Korean, Japanese and Indian descent.

Filipinas also make an appearance in the role of domestic helpers, who along with their Indonesian counterparts make up Hong Kong’s largest expatriate community, even if the government classes them as migrant workers and affords them with fewer legal rights. More than 300,000 of these women (and sometimes men) are integral to the lives of most Hong Kong expats, as well as Hong Kong’s middle and upper classes, providing childcare, cleaning, laundry, dog-walking and grocery shopping, six days a week, for a minimum salary of £480 a month. “I haven’t picked up an iron in the 20 years I’ve been here,” I recently overheard an English “trailing wife” tell her friends at a party. 

Hardly the crime of the century, but that’s not to say there aren’t badly behaved expats. There’s a tedious group of transplants whose Instagram feeds offer an endless stream of champagne quaffing and twerking on tables and I’ve heard “gweilos” (an unflattering Cantonese term for white foreigners) speak to Hong Kong’s waiters the way they would never talk to a Glaswegian equivalent, lest they receive a slap in the face. Expats have also been behind some of Hong Kong’s most gruesome crimes, including the 2003 case of an American woman who poisoned her Merrill Lynch banker husband with a laced milkshake before clubbing him to death with an ornament in their luxury home in Parkview, where two-bedroom apartments start at £8,000 a month. 

But, while there is an expat solar system that revolves around lavish apartments, Michelin-star restaurants, private yachts and supercars – plus occasional tales of wife-swapping – it’s just one part of Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan universe. And it’s a more rounded view of the city that we’re all hoping to see portrayed when we crack out the popcorn and tune into Expats. 

By Lee Cobaj

Dubai: ‘You can gain considerable wealth simply by being blonde and female’

Like Hong Kong, Dubai is a bit on the cosy side. Moving here is a fabulous remedy for loneliness, whether you like it or not. It takes more effort to avoid fellow expats – particularly those of the same nationality and profession – than to make friends with them. Six degrees of separation feels more like two. In this little Middle Eastern hub, most of us know at least two members of the cast of Netflix’s reality television show Dubai Bling.

While the Dubai Bling narrative espouses the get-rich-quick expat lifestyle the emirate has become famous for, further shows have fortified it, from The Real Housewives of Dubai (in fact, impressively industrious women who can sell their social media influence for thousands of dirhams) to the young estate agents finding their 15 minutes of fame as well as fat commissions by selling mega villas on palm-shaped islands in Dubai Hustle.

But is this the actual reality of expat life in Tripadvisor’s most popular holiday destination? Yes and no. 

Occasionally, the disillusioned expat departs, no better off than when they arrived. I also have friends who have walk-in wardrobes assigned entirely for the storage of Chanel handbags. Most people’s fortunes fall somewhere in between, based on a person’s skill set and how they scored in life’s passport lottery. 

Britons tend to do well; remuneration aligns with UK salaries, but the tax break represents a huge benefit. Relocating from Blighty to Dubai to work in a similar role is akin to getting a 20 to 40 per cent pay rise. Affluence is celebrated. My fellow expats have taught me how to spend my money without guilt or fear of “rainy days”, which seem implausible in this opportunity-rich, sun-drenched metropolis.

I’ve watched media colleagues scale the career pipe and gain considerable wealth simply by being blonde, female and not afraid to drive fast cars – or even just by exposing and “normalising” their cellulite on Instagram, a contribution to the era’s body positivity movement. 

High climbers are a talking point. In covert Facebook and WhatsApp groups their paths to fame are tracked and dissected with keen interest. Inspiration is appreciated and credit is given where it’s due – but the duplicitous are derided. Those preaching self-love and body acceptance while simultaneously loading up on Botox and fillers don’t fare well. 

Who is and isn’t taking skinny pen injections is the current hot topic. Wonder drugs intended for diabetics, such as Mounjaro and Ozempic, are available over the counter in Dubai for around £300 a month. Suddenly, both men and women previously struggling with weight issues are in great shape, but not everyone is admitting to having jabs.

Some insist they have cut the carbs, hit the gym and done the work, but their protestations are often met with sceptical raised eyebrows. In this fast-paced, opportunistic environment, taking shortcuts is totally acceptable – but withholding the secrets of your success is most certainly not.

By Sarah Hedley Hymers

Africa – and New York City: ‘Endlessly explaining yourself is a defining feature of the expat’

By accident of circumstances, I have found myself to be a triple expat. Taken as a babe-in-arms from Britain to the southern African colonies (Rhodesia and South Africa), I grew up in the heart of Africa listening to the BBC’s World Service; watching Z Cars, The Army Game and The Saint on television; supporting Liverpool Football Club and touring English cricket teams; and proudly standing to attention when God Save The Queen was broadcast before every cinema performance. This devotion to the motherland stretched to buying Beatle boots, tab-collar shirts and flared trousers whenever they were shipped out to the colony.  

This was long after the raucous heyday of the expat in Africa . In 1930s and 1940s Kenya , the words “Happy Valley” were a barely coded reference to upper class Britons drinking and fornicating. The extent of the decadence was revealed to the wider world in the White Mischief drama of the 1940s when Sir Henry “Jock” Delves Broughton allegedly shot and killed Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, a serial womaniser, for having an affair with his wife Diana. Further south in the Rhodesias and South Africa, a more raw-boned version of the British expat tribe tended to farm, go hunting and drink beer and whiskey rather than champagne and cognac. 

When I returned to the UK as an adult I found myself burdened with a southern African accent and a suntan and was thus regarded by my former English brethren as a white African. I naturally fell into the African expat mindset, reading the foreign pages in the national press first, hunting down Saffa expat shops that sold biltong, Black Cat peanut butter and Jungle Oats porridge, and seeking out old university friends, to whom I was so culturally attuned that I didn’t have to endlessly explain myself. That latter trait may well be one of the defining foundation blocks of the expat.

My final tour of duty as an expat was in New York in the 1990s as one of the British publishing pack. We sat around dinner tables in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side deriding the headline and caption writers on The New York Times (leaden use of the English language, tortuous metaphors), moaning about the cultural insularity of our American colleagues, even in New York, and shopping downtown at Myers of Keswick for HP sauce, Marmite and Frank Cooper’s Original Marmalade. (Keith Richards was a regular customer.) 

We would also assemble during the winter rugby season at an Upper East Side Irish bar named Eamon Doran’s, where we’d watch video tapes of the previous day’s Five Nations matches and consume pint after pint of Guinness. This was a time before the global reach of satellite broadcasting and the precious tapes were brought in by hand by Aer Lingus pilots. My regular companion on those expat Sundays was the Irish actor Richard Harris. A celebrity expat.

In fact, celebrity expats tended to be the flag-bearers of the glamour, the decadence and the subterfuge of Britain abroad through the 20th century. So, Graham Greene and William Somerset Maugham represented the literary insouciance of expat life in the south of France; Quentin Crisp was our Englishman in New York; Samuel Beckett and Jane Birkin were our bohemian representatives in Paris: and Ian Fleming and Noel Coward our men in Jamaica. They all represented the spirit of the British abroad, the expat either as adventurer or as black sheep, cast out by friends or family to distant corners of the earth where they would cause little embarrassment.

The blurb for the new Kidman series declares that it will follow “the vibrant lives of a close-knit expatriate community: where affluence is celebrated, friendships are intense but knowingly temporary, and personal lives, deaths and marriages are played out publicly – then retold with glee.” We shall see. It will take a lot to live up to the rackety lives of the expats of old.  

By Graham Boynton

France: ‘I came across tales of adultery, of alcoholism and accusations of bestiality’

I’ve lived abroad, in France , for 35 years and have occasionally bounced around the fringes of expat circles. I mainly came away with a hangover. 

As so many are retired, the festivities tend to start early. “What will you be having?” asked one English host with a property on the Med. It was about 10am on, I think, a Tuesday. I had barely breakfasted. In one hand he held a bottle of wine, in the other gin. Over a couple of days, it became clear that this was not considered eccentric in his (British) social circle. As a result, offshore yachting jaunts gained much in unpredictability.

Another British bunch I encountered in south-west France had colonised most of a small village, bringing with them epic thirsts both for drink and for the sort of conflict which simmers in any community but which may erupt when that community is forced in upon itself by surrounding foreignness. And by folk who speak French. And by booze.

Among much else, I came across tales of adultery, of alcoholism and of killer boundary disputes, claims of violence and accusations of bestiality. That was a surprise. Individually, the expats all seemed fine. Between themselves some verged on the toxic, reproducing all the tensions of home but in higher definition because they were away.

These are doubtless extremes. Most “expats” are simply “pats” who happen to live overseas. They customarily claim not to want to mix with other Britons, but that’s mainly untrue. This is because they need to speak to someone and few have mastered enough French. And they need to do so with people for whom The Archers, Dixon Of Dock Green, QPR, John Ogdon and the 1962 Humber Super Snipe all ring bells. Or else what are they going to talk about?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Communities worldwide are made up of different elements. The British in, say, the Dordogne are like the London Welsh or London Irish in London – a well-defined constituent group but also part of the greater whole. I’d say this makes the Dordogne a more interesting place (as the presence of foreigners in London adds to the capital’s lustre). More welcoming, too: the native French peasantry doesn’t invariably smile at visitors.

As it happens, I don’t experience much expat society. I have my hands full with a French wife, French kids, French in-laws, French neighbours – and, most recently, French thieves who this very week drained €1,000 (£850) from our French bank account. But I like bumping into other British exiles, partly because they tend to be open, interested and enterprising – otherwise, they’d have stayed in Swindon – partly because none have ever stolen from me, and partly because there isn’t a Frenchman alive who can join me in conversations about Preston North End, Barclay James Harvest or the relative merits of Eccles and Chorley cakes.

By Anthony Peregrine

Australia: ‘My Outback adventures were a violent, alcohol-soaked romp’

For much of its existence, Australia has been deeply unfashionable – at least to British people of a certain disposition. The English middle class, in particular, usually found New Zealand, South Africa and even Canada far more congenial or, dare we say, more civilised. 

English expats looking for Shropshire on the Pacific were repelled by Australia’s vast, dry terrain and deadly wildlife – and shocked by the open hostility of locals. 

In my 20s I worked in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, where “pommy bashing” was a well-honed sport, almost as popular as boozing and hunting kangaroos. “You poms think you’re the only ones who can piss uphill,” an old bloke in the pub told me. 

My adventures in the Australian Outback were not dissimilar to the classic Australian film Wake In Fright – a violent, alcohol-soaked romp, starring Donald Pleasence and Jack Thompson, set in the fictional mining town of Bundanyabba. 

“What’s the matter with him?” says Dick (Thompson), the town larrikin, pointing to a young man in the pub. “He’d rather talk to a woman than drink?” His companion mutters: “Schoolteacher.”

Back in the 1980s Australia’s oldest city, Sydney, seemed to offer a refuge for a pink-cheeked pom fresh off the bus after a 2,500-mile trek from Perth. I enquired about a room at a motel. “How many hours do you need it for?” asked the receptionist. 

But Sydney was a revelation – for myself and for the cohort of English expats who quickly coalesced in a series of shared houses, riotous parties and weekends in the Blue Mountains. I loved the texture of Sydney, with its naked materialism and unbreakable optimism, and my love affair has endured for three decades. I still get a thrill driving across the Sydney Harbour Bridge or hiking to South Head to watch the swell roll in from the Pacific. 

The internet, cheaper air travel and global brand marketing has dramatically altered the experience of being a British expat in Australia and diluted the peculiarities of life Down Under. These days nobody needs to get on a plane for that much-missed pint of bitter, pork pie or Eccles cake and you can load all your favourite UK news feeds onto your iPhone, tuning into LBC, Radio 4 or Radio Cornwall on the way to work. 

Australia’s self-confidence has exploded while Britain’s international standing has diminished. Despite the Ashes, the Royal family and the popularity of UK quiz shows (okay, and Doc Martin), I feel the two countries are drifting apart. 

The role of the English expat in Australia is also changing. The new generation of arrivals seems to shed their Englishness in the arrivals hall at Sydney Airport. By the time they hit Bondi Beach they are fully naturalised, in flip-flops, zinc cream and board shorts. 

Old campaigners, like myself, are still living the expat dream, relishing the space, freedom and beauty of Sydney while preserving our cultural identity, protecting the English language and generally flying the flag for British eccentricity. 

By Mark Chipperfield

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Tour the World’s Most Luxurious Submarine Superyacht

By Dave Banks

Photography by Migaloo

If yacht owners really want to put everyone at port to shame, they should consider sailing on the Migaloo Private Submersible Yacht. A concept yacht created by Migaloo, an Austrian design and engineering firm, the line of luxury superyachts offers a range of bespoke underwater crafts that vary in size. After sailing the new Migaloo submersible yacht on the water, owners can close up the decks and turn the craft into a fully operational submarine.

“What we are attempting to do is to create a living space where exterior and interior interact in harmony,” says Christian Gumpold, managing director and head of design at Migaloo. With rooms that open to the ocean for dining alfresco while above water, and large viewing galleries for taking in the marine life when submersed, the Migaloo creates that harmony. What’s more, the firm reaffirms its focus on luxury with optional amenities that include helipads, swimming pools, movie theaters, elevators, wine cellars, libraries, and private terraces.

The Migaloo submersible yacht moving underwater.

Of course, safety is a major focal point as well. Each superyacht will be built to U.S. Navy SUBSAFE safety standards, which ensure that the interiors will stay watertight and the vessel can recover from unanticipated flooding. According to Migaloo, solitude is a major point of interest for yacht owners, which is why the ability to dive beneath the surface and out of view might have great appeal. “Privacy is a big issue on superyachts,” says Gumpold, “our answer to this concern is simply submerging the vessel into complete privacy.”

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Private planes, mansions and superyachts: What gives billionaires like Musk and Abramovich such a massive carbon footprint

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Tesla’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been vying for the world’s richest person ranking all year after the former’s wealth soared a staggering US$160 billion in 2020, putting him briefly in the top spot .

Musk isn’t alone in seeing a significant increase in wealth during a year of pandemic, recession and death. Altogether, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth surge over $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes.

Those are astronomical numbers, and it’s hard to get one’s head around them without some context. As anthropologists who study energy and consumer culture, we wanted to examine how all that wealth translated into consumption and the resulting carbon footprint.

Walking in a billionaire’s shoes

We found that billionaires have carbon footprints that can be thousands of times higher than those of average Americans.

The wealthy own yachts, planes and multiple mansions, all of which contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. For example, a superyacht with a permanent crew, helicopter pad, submarines and pools emits about 7,020 tons of CO2 a year, according to our calculations, making it by the far worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint. Transportation and real estate make up the lion’s share of most people’s carbon footprint, so we focused on calculating those categories for each billionaire.

To pick a sample of billionaires, we started with the 2020 Forbes List of 2,095 billionaires. A random or representatives sample of billionaire carbon footprints is impossible because most wealthy people shy away from publicity , so we had to focus on those whose consumption is public knowledge. This excluded most of the superrich in Asia and the Middle East .

We combed 82 databases of public records to document billionaires’ houses, vehicles, aircraft and yachts. After an exhaustive search, we started with 20 well-known billionaires whose possessions we were able to ascertain, while trying to include some diversity in gender and geography. We have submitted our paper for peer review but plan to continue adding to our list.

We then used a wide range of sources, such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Carbon Footprint , to estimate the annual CO2 emissions of each house, aircraft, vehicle and yacht. In some cases we had to estimate the size of houses from satellite images or photos and the use of private aircraft and yachts by searching the popular press and drawing on other studies . Our results are based on analyzing typical use of each asset given its size and everything else we could learn.

We did not try to calculate each asset’s “ embodied carbon ” emissions – that is, how much CO2 is burned throughout the supply chain in making the product – or the emissions produced by their family, household employees or entourage. We also didn’t include the emissions of companies of which they own part or all, because that would have added another significant degree of complexity. For example, we didn’t calculate the emissions of Tesla or Amazon when calculating Musk’s or Bezos’ footprints.

In other words, these are all likely conservative estimates of how much they emit.

Your carbon footprint

To get a sense of perspective, let’s start with the carbon footprint of the average person.

Residents of the U.S., including billionaires, emitted about 15 tons of CO2 per person in 2018. The global average footprint is smaller, at just about 5 tons per person.

In contrast, the 20 people in our sample contributed an average of about 8,190 tons of CO2 in 2018. But some produced far more greenhouse gases than others.

The jet-setting billionaire

Roman Abramovich, who made most of his $19 billion fortune trading oil and gas, was the biggest polluter on our list. Outside of Russia, he is probably best known as the headline-grabbing owner of London’s Chelsea Football Club.

Abramovich cruises the Mediterranean in his superyacht, named the Eclipse , which at 162.5 meters bow to stern is the second-biggest in the world, rivaling some cruise ships. And he hops the globe on a custom-designed Boeing 767 , which boasts a 30-seat dining room. He takes shorter trips in his Gulfstream G650 jet, one of his two helicopters or the submarine on his yacht.

He maintains homes in many countries, including a mansion in London’s Kensington Park Gardens, a chateau in Cap D’Antibes in France and a 28-hectare estate in St. Barts that once belonged to David Rockefeller . In 2018, he left the U.K. and settled in Israel , where he became a dual citizen and bought a home in 2020 for $64.5 million.

We estimate that he was responsible for at least 33,859 metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2018 – more than two-thirds from his yacht, which is always ready to use at a moment’s notice year-round.

Massive mansions and private jets

Bill Gates, currently the world’s fourth-richest person with $124 billion, is a “modest” polluter – by billionaire standards – and is typical of those who may not own a giant yacht but make up for it with private jets.

Co-founder of Microsoft, he retired in 2020 to manage the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charity, with an endowment of $50 billion.

In the 1990s, Gates built Xanadu – named after the vast fictional estate in Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” – at a cost of $127 million in Medina, Washington. The giant home covers 6,131 square meters, with a 23-car garage, a 20-person cinema and 24 bathrooms. He also owns at least five other dwellings in Southern California, the San Juan Islands in Washington state, North Salem, New York, and New York City, as well as a horse farm , four private jets, a seaplane and “a collection” of helicopters .

We estimated his annual footprint at 7,493 metric tons of carbon, mostly from a lot of flying.

The environmentally minded tech CEO

South African-born Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has a surprisingly low carbon footprint despite being the world’s second-richest person, with $177 billion – and he seems intent on setting an example for other billionaires .

He doesn’t own a superyacht and says he doesn’t even take vacations .

We calculated a relatively modest carbon footprint for him in 2018, thanks to his eight houses and one private jet. This year, his carbon footprint would be even lower because in 2020 he sold all of his houses and promised to divest the rest of his worldly possessions .

While his personal carbon footprint is still hundreds of times higher than that of an average person, he demonstrates that the superrich still have choices to make and can indeed lower their environmental impact if they so choose.

His estimated footprint from the assets we looked at was 2,084 tons in 2018.

The value of naming and shaming

The aim of our ongoing research is to get people to think about the environmental burden of wealth.

While plenty of research has shown that rich countries and wealthy people produce far more than their share of greenhouse gas emissions, these studies can feel abstract and academic, making it harder to change this behavior.

[ Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter .]

We believe “shaming” – for lack of a better word – superrich people for their energy-intensive spending habits can have an important impact, revealing them as models of overconsumption that people shouldn’t emulate.

Newspapers, cities and local residents made an impact during the California droughts of 2014 and 2015 by “drought shaming” celebrities and others who were wasting water, seen in their continually green lawns . And the Swedes came up with a new term – “ flygskam ” or flying shame – to raise awareness about the climate impact of air travel.

Climate experts say that to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, countries must cut their emissions in half by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050.

Asking average Americans to adopt less carbon-intensive lifestyles to achieve this goal can be galling and ineffective when it would take about 550 of their lifetimes to equal the carbon footprint of the average billionaire on our list.

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All aboard S.S. Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly gifted himself a $300 million megayacht, dubbed “Launchpad,” ahead of his 40th birthday.

The staggering 387-foot-long vessel was seen floating at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after arriving at its berth earlier this week, The Sun reported Thursday.

The multi-layered luxury ship’s sleek exterior was designed by Espen Øino International and boasts a steel hull and an aluminum superstructure, according to SuperYacht Times.

Reportedly ranking as the 45th largest yacht in the world, the interiors are just as aesthetically pleasing and reportedly executed by Zuretti Interior Design company, a France-based company specializing in unique and custom yacht design.

The breathtakingly beautiful floater stands out with a navy blue theme matching an American flag perched proudly on its wood-paneled stern.

There are several outdoor areas where the social media maven will be able to relax with his family and the indoor levels feature glass paneling allowing for tons of natural light.

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There also appears to be a helipad perfect for whenever the Facebook co-founder wants to travel to his vessel by air.

The Feadship-built yacht, built in 2022, can comfortably fit 24 guests aboard, requires a crew of 48, and is said to cost $30 million a year for upkeep and usage, according to Superyachtfan.com .

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Boatworld insiders have been buzzing with speculation that Zuckerberg is the owner of the newly minted mega-cruise ever since it made its main voyage from the Netherlands last week.

The tech titan was spotted touring the Russian-commissioned megayacht in early March, though the impressive boat didn’t arrive stateside until this week due to sanctions, according to The Sun.

The website reported that Zuckerberg purchased the pricey yacht – along with its own $30 million partner boat — most likely as an early 40th birthday present to himself.

The boat reportedly traveled to Florida after being granted special permission to be imported just weeks ahead of Zuckerberg’s birthday on May 14.

Zuckerberg’s yacht is just 30 feet shorter than the length of fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos’ 417-foot megayacht Koru, which the Amazon boss snagged for a whopping $500 million.

Zuckerberg’s rep did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

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Palm Beach’s only private island and its renovated-on-speculation mansion is under contract with an asking price of $187.5 million, according to a sales listing updated Monday in the multiple listing service. 

The property at 10 Tarpon Isle is the most expensive house for sale in Palm Beach. 

There’s no word yet on the buyer, the amount to change hands or when the sale will close. 

Affording panoramic views of the Lake Worth Lagoon and Intracoastal Waterway, the artificial island in the Estate Section measures about 2.3 acres with a combined 1,163 feet of waterfront on all four sides. A picturesque bridge connects the island to Tarpon Way, which leads to the rest of Palm Beach via Tarpon Way and Island Road. 

The 11-bedroom, two-story mansion has 28,618 total square feet of living space, inside and out, and a long list of amenities, including a 98-foot lakefront swimming pool with a whirlpool spa and a "cold plunge" pool.

The property was redeveloped by Palm Beach and Miami developer Todd Michael Glaser with two real estate investors, Jonathan Fryd of Fryd Properties in Miami and developer Scott Robins of Scott Robins Cos. in Miami Beach. 

Glaser declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement. But he previously told the Palm Beach Daily News that Tarpon Island's location is truly one of a kind.

“It has its own bridge. How many houses in Palm Beach have a bridge? None,” Glaser said in a December article about the house .

The estate comprises the new main residence on the west side of Tarpon Island. The original 1937 house was converted into a guest pavilion and includes an ultra-luxury fitness-and-beauty area. 

Among the estate’s other features are a five-car garage and one of the town’s only lighted tennis courts. Other amenities include a paneled library; a home gym; and an entertainment room with a fireplace, wine storage, billiards area and movie lounge.

Fryd and Robins have invested in other Glaser-controlled projects in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade County, where the developer built his career before turning his attention to buying, renovating and selling homes in Palm Beach several years ago. Glaser's eponymous company has offices in Miami Beach and Palm Beach. 

Tarpon Island set a town lakefront price record when the developers bought the property and its original house for $85 million in July 2021 from its longtime owners, private investor William Toll and his wife, Eileen. 

In October 2021, the property was listed at $125 million for the land and renovation plans for the original house. At the same time, the property also was listed then at a pre-construction price of $210 million, which would have included the renovated house. 

The price was later raised to $218 million while still in construction, before dropping to $187.5 million in November .

Agents Suzanne Frisbie of the Corcoran Group and Chris Leavitt of Douglas Elliman Real Estate hold the listing. Broker Christian Angle of Christian Angle Real Estate also is involved on the sellers’ side.

Frisbie, Leavitt and Angle declined to comment.

Agent Margit Brandt of Premier Estate Properties is on the buyer’s side of the sale, according to people familiar with the transaction. She also declined to comment.

The renovation-and-expansion project  transformed the island’s original Bermuda-style house — designed in 1937 by noted Palm Beach architect Howard Major  — into a guesthouse. A new, much-larger addition for the main living areas was built onto it in a similar architectural style.  

“We flip-flopped the house. You can’t tell where one house started and the other began,” Glaser said in December.

Into the repurposed guesthouse went VIP guest suites, the spa area with its sauna and steam room, a hair-styling salon and staff quarters.

The guesthouse nearly abuts the east property line. “So when you are in the gym, you feel like you are on a yacht,” Glaser said previously. 

The new addition to the west houses the main living areas, most of the bedroom suites and the garage. An air-conditioned octagonal tennis-and-dining pavilion, rising two stories, is attached to the house and overlooks the tennis court on the far west side of the property.

Windows, patios, terraces and the dock on the south side of the house afford views straight down the Intracoastal Waterway for a little more than a mile to the Southern Boulevard Bridge, past former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. The views also include Everglades Island to the west and Palm Beach’s Estate Section to the east.

Architect Roger Janssen of Dailey Janssen Architects drew up the plans for the Tarpon Island project. Christopher Cawley Landscape Architecture designed the grounds. The interior finishes were chosen by Glaser’s wife, interior decorator Kim Glaser.

The Palm Beach Daily News was the first media outlet to report the so-called “pending” status of the property in the MLS.

To see more photos of Tarpon Island, click on the photo gallery at the top of this page.

This story was updated from a previous version. This a developing story. Check back for updates. Portions of this story appeared previously in the Palm Beach Daily News.

Darrell Hofheinz is a USA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tips about real estate news on the island. Email [email protected] , call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz.

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Diddy's private jet tracked to caribbean island amid raids in u.s., diddy loveair private jet tracked amid raids down on caribbean island, exclusive 3.6k 3/25/2024 4:22 pm pt.

Diddy 's homes were raided in the U.S. to kick off the week -- but the guy's own private jet is miles away in a completely different nation ... although it's unclear if he's aboard himself.

TMZ has tracked Diddy's personal LoveAir LLC jet -- the well-known black Gulfstream 5 that Diddy has flaunted and flown for years now -- and it looks like the aircraft is currently on the ground in Antigua ... which is down in the Caribbean.

Based on the flight activity, viewed by TMZ, Diddy's jet has been up and down California between Sunday and Monday -- taking off from Sacramento Executive Airport Sunday evening around 5:30 PM PT and landing at Palm Springs Int'l Airport about an hour later.

An hour after that, around 7:30 PM PT, Diddy's jet took off from Palm Springs yet again and landed at Van Nuys Airport, which is in the L.A. area, about 30 minutes later around 8:00 PM PT. Around 9 AM PT Monday, the jet took off from Van Nuys airport and landed at some point in Antigua.

The plane is currently grounded there, although the flight data has yet to update and register him as having officially landed. In any case, it's definitely Diddy's jet ... no question.

The only thing that remains unanswered is whether Diddy is on the plane -- we don't have any evidence he is at this point ... and we also don't know what's happening on the scene.

As we reported ... two of Diddy's homes, in L.A. and MIami, were swarmed by federal law enforcement agencies Monday -- and armed officials stormed the properties, taking some people into custody ... including his sons Justin and King . Unclear if any arrests took place.

The raids are believed to have stemmed from accusations hurled at Diddy in multiple lawsuits -- which have touched on alleged human and sex trafficking, among other claims ... all of which he's vehemently denied.

We've reached out to Diddy's rep and lawyers ... so far, no word back.

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Louisiana may fund private school for students rich and poor with education savings accounts

Louisiana could begin paying for any student, rich or poor, to attend private schools as momentum for legislation creating education savings accounts builds in both the state House and Senate to fulfill one of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry's top priorities.

"This will truly allow money to follow the child and allow parents to choose the best education for their children," said Republican Lafayette Rep. Julie Emerson Tuesday when presenting her House Bill 745 in the House Education Committee, which advanced the measure favorably with no objections.

Senate Bill 313, a duplicate measure by Baton Rouge Republican Sen. Rick Edmonds, cleared the Senate Education Committee last week.

"Let us send a loud and clear message that a parent is the most important voice in a child's education," Landry said during his speech to open the Legislative Session. "We should put parents back in control and let the money follow the child."

The education savings account program could cost the state $258 million in new spending by its third year, according to the Legislative Fiscal Office. By comparison, Louisiana's popular scholarship program TOPs, which is a merit-based program, is expected to cost $307 million this year.

EdChoice, a pro-school choice nonprofit organization, estimates the program could cost $358 million by the third years and an analysis by the Public Research Council of Louisiana estimates the program could cost more than $500 million annually over the long haul.

Louisiana currenty funds a voucher program in which the state pays for students to attend private schools if they are stuck in public schools that are rated C, D or F schools. The voucher program currently covers private school tuition for about 6,000 students at an annual cost of $45 million.

In the voucher program, the state funding is sent directly to the private schools, but in the proposed universal education saving account program the public money will go directly to the parents and can be usued for tuition, tutoring, transportation to schools, technology or other education-related expenses like uniforms.

Annual education savings account awards would be $5,100 for students from higher income families, $7,500 for students from lower income families and $15,000 for students with special needs.

There are about 116,000 Louisiana students currently enrolled in private schools.

Emerson said 14 other states have implemented education savings account programs.

If the Legislature passes the program and Landry signs it into law it would be phased in over three years beginning during the 2025-2026 school year favoring current voucher students and lower-income students in the first year before making everyone eligible in the third year.

"At the end of the day who pays the tax dollars?" Emerson said. "We do. The parents do."

But opponents fear the program will drain resources from the public school system and question whether private schools will be held to the same standard as public schools.

"How can we ensure the money follow the child to a school that's not failing?" said Democratic LaPlace Rep. Sylvia Elaine Taylor, who said the program will create a "double-standard."

Though the money used to fund private tuition won't come directly from current public school funding, some expressed concern that it would cause more parents to pull their children from the public system, even from top-rated schools, which would dimish public school funding that is based on the number of students enrolled.

"I don't believe this bill will shut down public schools and that's not my intention," Emerson said. "I don't envision a lot of students will leave high performing schools, but some will."

But Melissa Flournoy with the 10,000 Women organization said the new program is sending "the message that public schools don't work and that we need to move people out of public schools."

"My concern is we're not investing in public education to make sure every child has those same advantages," Flournoy said.

The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, the state's public school board, supports the program and the Louisiana School Boards Association has temporarily dropped its opposition while it works with Emerson to address concerns.

More: Why are Louisiana lawmakers considering scrapping vehicle safety inspection stickers?

Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1. 

Baltimore bridge collapse wasn't first major accident for giant container ship Dali

This story will be updated throughout the day, so bookmark and check back.

Propulsion failed on the cargo ship that struck the Francis Key Bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday as it was leaving port, causing it to collapse into the frigid Patapsco River. Its crew warned Maryland officials of a possible collision because they had lost control.

“The vessel notified MD Department of Transportation (MDOT) that they had lost control of the vessel” and a collision with the bridge “was possible,” according to an unclassified Department of Homeland Security report. “The vessel struck the bridge causing a complete collapse.”

An official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed to USA TODAY that the DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is working with federal, state, and local officials “to understand the potential impacts of this morning’s collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.”

Clay Diamond, executive director, American Pilots’ Association, told USA TODAY power issues are not unusual on cargo ships, which are so large they cannot easily course correct.

“It’s likely that virtually every pilot in the country has experienced a power loss of some kind (but) it generally is momentary,” Diamond said. “This was a complete blackout of all the power on the ship, so that’s unusual. Of course this happened at the worst possible location.” 

The ship in Tuesday's crash, Dali, was involved in at least one prior accident when it collided with a shipping pier in Belgium.

That 2016 incident occurred as the Dali was leaving port in Antwerp and struck a loading pier made of stone, causing damage to the ship’s stern, according to VesselFinder.com, a site that tracks ships across the world. An investigation determined a mistake made by the ship’s master and pilot was to blame.

No one was injured in that crash, although the ship required repair and a full inspection before being returned to service. The pier – or berth – was also seriously damaged and had to be closed.

VesselFinder reports that the Dali was chartered by Maersk, the same company chartering it during the Baltimore harbor incident.

The 9-year-old container ship had passed previous inspections during its time at sea, but during one such inspection in June at the Port of San Antonio in Chile, officials discovered a deficiency with its "propulsion and auxiliary machinery (gauges, thermometers, etc)," according to the Tokyo MOU, an intergovernmental maritime authority in the Asia-Pacific region.

The report provided no other information about the deficiency except to note that it was not serious enough to remove the ship from service.

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Why did Dali crash into the Baltimore bridge?

Officials said Tuesday they’re investigating the collision, including whether systems on board lost electricity early Tuesday morning, which could be related to mechanical failure, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Accidents at sea, known as marine casualties, are not uncommon, the source told USA TODAY. However, “allisions,” in which a moving object strikes a stationary one with catastrophic results, are far less common. The investigation of the power loss aboard the Dali, a Singapore-flagged vessel, will be a high priority.

In a video posted to social media, lights on the Dali shut off, then turned back on, then shut off again before the ship struck a support pier on the bridge.

Numerous cargo and cruise ships have lost power over the years.

The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea requires all international vessels to have two independent sources of electricity, both of which should be able to maintain the ship's seaworthiness on their own, according to a safety study about power failures on ships , citing the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea.

The Dali's emergency generator was likely responsible for the lights coming back on after the initial blackout, Diamond said.

“There was still some steerage left when they initially lost power,” he said. “We’ve been told the ship never recovered propulsion. The emergency generator is a diesel itself – so if you light off the generator, that’s also going to put off a puff of exhaust.”

Under maritime law, all foreign flagged vessels must be piloted into state ports by a state licensed pilot so the Dali's pilot is licensed by Association of Maryland Pilots .

Diamond described the incident based on information from the Maryland agency that licensed the pilot aboard the ship. His organization represents that group and all other state piloting agencies in the US.

“The pilot was directing navigation of the ship as it happened,” he said. “He asked the captain to get the engines back online. They weren’t able to do that, so the pilot took all the action he could. He tried to steer, to keep the ship in the channel. He also dropped the ship’s anchor to slow the ship and guide the direction.

“Neither one was enough. The ship never did regain its engine power.”

How big is the Dali ship?

The Dali is a 984-foot container vessel built in 2015 by Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea. With a cruising speed of about 22 knots – roughly 25 mph. It has traveled the world carrying goods from port to port.

The ship, constructed of high-strength steel, has one engine and one propeller, according to MartineTraffic.com.

The Dali arrived in Baltimore on Sunday from the Port of Norfolk in Virginia. Before that, it had been in New York and came through the Panama Canal.

It remains at the scene of the collapse as authorities investigate.

Who owns and operates the Dali?

It is owned by the Singapore-based Grace Ocean Pte Ltd but managed by Synergy Marine Group, also based in Singapore. It was carrying Maersk customers’ cargo, according to a statement from the shipping company.

“We are deeply concerned by this incident and are closely monitoring the situation,” Maersk said in the statement. 

Synergy, which describes itself as a leading ship manager with more than 600 vessels under its guidance, issued a statement on its website acknowledging the incident and reporting no injuries among its crew and no pollution in the water. There were two pilots on board and 22 crew members in all, according to Synergy, all of them from India.

USA TODAY reached out to Synergy on Tuesday, but the company did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Contributing: Josh Susong

The owner of a $3.4 million Lamborghini yacht screamed 'I will kill you' and threw $100 bills into the water when told he couldn't use a private dock

• The owner of a Lamborghini yacht threatened a private dock employee, per CBS8.
• The employee said Ajay Thakore mooned and threw cash at him after being told he couldn't use the dock.
• Thakore, the CEO of Doctor Multimedia, issued an apology through his public relations team.

The owner of a $3.4 million Lamborghini yacht threatened a private dock employee after being told he couldn't be there, the San Diego-based broadcaster CBS8 reported on March 11.

Joseph Holt, a 21-year-old employee at Marriot Marina in San Diego, told CBS8 that he spotted the yacht sailing into the private dock. The owner, whom CBS8 identified as Ajay Thakore, tried to pick another person up at the dock, Holt said.

"I told him respectfully that he couldn't be there, and I honestly was hoping to have a conversation with him about his cool boat," Holt told CBS8.

In a YouTube video posted by @SM-wc9eq on March 10, a dark blue Tecnomar for Lamborghini 63 is seen sailing out of a dock. A man in a gray T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a cap was shown standing on the yacht. The man appeared to be Thakore, per CBS8.

Thakore was shown shouting at Holt. "I will kill you, you know I will kill you!" he can be heard saying multiple times in the video

Thakore was later shown pounding his fist on his palm and pointing his thumb down before telling Holt: "To your face!" Holt was shown responding by pointing his middle finger at Thakore.

"I really was trying to restrain myself from getting fired from my job or stepping out of line. The only thing I did was give him the bird," Holt told CBS8.

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Holt said Thakore then took $100 bills from his wallet and threw them at him. He added that Thakore mooned him. This exchange was not shown in the video.

"He was saying I'm nobody, I'm nothing, I work a silly job. He said that he knows people, he has connections, he can change my life and ruin it," Holt said. Holt did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The San Diego Harbor Police arrived at the marina 10 minutes after Thakore's yacht exited the dock, per CBS8.

The Harbor Police told Business Insider that Holt decided to press charges against Thakore and that they are investigating the incident.

According to Thakore's LinkedIn page , he's the CEO of Doctor Multimedia. The company's website shows that it's a healthcare marketing firm based in San Diego. Thakore appears to go by the name Ace Rogers on Instagram and TikTok, where he's noted as being a professional gambler.

Thakore, through his public relations team, told CBS8 in a statement that his altercation with Holt was "regrettable."

"What started as a minor misunderstanding escalated into an argument, and I apologize for my actions and to those who witnessed the unfortunate exchange," the statement said. Thakore did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

Thakore isn't the only CEO who's been called out for threatening another person. In November 2021, an Activision spokesperson told BI that its ex-CEO Bobby Kotick had previously apologized for telling his assistant he would have her killed. The spokesperson added that Kotick's threat was "obviously hyperbolic and inappropriate" and that "he deeply regrets the exaggeration and tone."

In June 2020, Lisa Alexander, the CEO of LaFace Skincare, a cosmetics company, apologized in a statement to the media after she had threatened to call the police on her neighbor for writing "Black Lives Matter" on his property. Alexander said in the apology that she was "disrespectful" and "should have minded my own business."

March 21, 2024: This story has been updated with Harbor Police's comments.

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