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Rising Sun yacht: The luxurious world of Larry Ellison and David Geffen’s nautical retreat

Rising Sun is a notable super yacht known for its size and high-profile owners. Here are some key details about the Rising Sun yacht.

Brief Overview

Rising Sun was originally built for American business magnate Larry Ellison , the co-founder of Oracle Corporation. However, Ellison later sold a significant portion of the yacht to music and film producer David Geffen. Today it is co-owned by Larry Ellison and David Geffen.

Rising Sun is approximately 454 feet (138 meters) in length, making it one of the largest yachts in the world at the time. Its impressive size allows for a wide range of amenities and luxuries.

Design and Features

The yacht boasts a stunning exterior design and a luxurious interior. It’s equipped with multiple decks, a swimming pool, a basketball court that can be converted into a helipad, and a variety of dining and entertainment spaces. The interior features opulent staterooms and lounges.

Cruising Range

Rising Sun is powered by powerful engines, which give it a a top speed of around 28 knots (about 32 mph or 52 km/h). This allows the yacht to cover vast distances on the open sea.

Part 1: Ownership of Rising Sun

Who are the notable owners of the rising sun yacht.

The Rising Sun yacht is co-owned by two prominent figures in the world of business and entertainment: Larry Ellison and David Geffen.

Who is Larry Ellison?

Larry Ellison is a renowned American entrepreneur and the co-founder of Oracle Corporation, one of the world’s leading software and cloud computing companies. With his immense success in the tech industry, Ellison has amassed substantial wealth and has used some of it to indulge in a life of luxury, including the ownership of Rising Sun.

Who is David Geffen?

David Geffen is a prominent figure in the entertainment industry. He is a music and film producer, co-founder of Asylum Records, and a co-founder of DreamWorks SKG. Geffen is known for his influence in the world of entertainment and, like Ellison, enjoys the opulent lifestyle provided by the Rising Sun yacht.

Part 2: Size, Design, and Features

How large is the rising sun yacht.

Rising Sun is a colossal super yacht, measuring approximately 454 feet (138 meters) in length. Its vast dimensions are a testament to its opulence and the array of amenities it offers.

What are the design and features of Rising Sun?

Rising Sun is an architectural marvel, featuring a stunning exterior design and an interior that exudes luxury. Onboard, guests can enjoy multiple decks, a lavish swimming pool, a basketball court that converts into a helipad, and a variety of dining and entertainment spaces. The interior is adorned with opulent staterooms and lounges, making it a floating palace on the seas.

Part 3: Cruising Range of Rising Sun

What is the cruising range of the rising sun yacht.

Thanks to its powerful engines, Rising Sun has an impressive cruising speed of approximately 28 knots, which translates to about 32 miles per hour (52 kilometers per hour). This remarkable speed allows the yacht to cover vast distances during its journeys across the ocean, providing its passengers with access to a wide range of destinations.

Part 4: Notable Guests of Rising Sun

Who are some of the notable guests who have been aboard rising sun.

Rising Sun has been a favored choice for hosting celebrities and high-profile events. Some of the notable guests who have had the privilege of experiencing the yacht’s luxury include:

• Oprah Winfrey : The iconic talk show host and media mogul has been spotted aboard Rising Sun, enjoying the yacht’s lavish amenities.
• Steven Spielberg : The renowned filmmaker and director has also graced the decks of Rising Sun, adding a touch of Hollywood glamour to its guest list.
• Tom Hanks : The beloved actor Tom Hanks has enjoyed the yacht’s hospitality during his time on the open seas.
• Bruce Springsteen : The rock legend Bruce Springsteen is another famous personality who has been a guest aboard Rising Sun, making his voyages truly unforgettable.

What makes Rising Sun a preferred choice for such guests?

Rising Sun’s opulent interior, world-class amenities, and exceptional service make it a sought-after destination for celebrities and high-profile individuals. Its spacious decks and luxurious accommodations provide the perfect backdrop for relaxation and entertainment, ensuring that every voyage is a memorable experience for its guests.

In conclusion, the Rising Sun yacht, co-owned by Larry Ellison and David Geffen, represents the epitome of luxury on the high seas. With its impressive size, breathtaking design, remarkable cruising range, and a list of notable guests that includes some of the biggest names in entertainment and business, it continues to be a symbol of opulence and indulgence in the world of super yachts. Whether you’re interested in its ownership, design, or the celebrities who have graced its decks, the Rising Sun yacht is a true icon of maritime luxury.

Technical specifications and additional details about the Rising Sun yacht

Length: Approximately 454 feet (138 meters)

Rising Sun has a steel hull and aluminum superstructure with a beam of 18.5m (60.70ft) and a 5m (16.40ft) draft.

Estimated to be around 7,500 tons

Cruising Speed: Approximately 28 knots (32 mph or 52 km/h)

Maximum Speed: Around 30 knots (34.5 mph or 55.5 km/h)

Crew Members

The Rising Sun yacht typically employs a large crew to ensure top-notch service and maintenance. The exact number can vary but may range from around 45 to 55 crew members, including officers, chefs, stewards, and technical staff.

Positions of Crew Members

The crew members on Rising Sun are organized into various departments, including deck, engineering, interior, and more. Specific positions can include captain, first officer, stewardesses, engineers, deckhands, and chefs, among others.

Number of Rooms

Rising Sun boasts an impressive number of rooms and accommodations, including numerous staterooms and suites for guests. While the exact count can vary, it typically offers accommodations for around 16 to 18 guests.

Other Amenities

Rising Sun offers a wide range of luxurious amenities, including:

• Multiple dining areas for formal and casual dining experiences.
• A stunning swimming pool with jacuzzi features on the deck.
• A basketball court that can be converted into a helipad.
• A dedicated cinema room for entertainment.
• An on-deck bar for social gatherings.
• A gymnasium and spa facilities for guests to relax and stay active during their voyage.
• A high-quality audio-visual entertainment system throughout the yacht.
• A library and study area for quiet moments.

Support Vehicles

Super yachts like Rising Sun often come equipped with support vessels, such as smaller boats and jet skis, for various recreational activities and transportation to and from shore.

Additional Information

• Rising Sun is equipped with state-of-the-art navigation and communication systems to ensure safety and efficient travel.
• The yacht’s interior is designed with opulent materials, including marble and rare woods, adding to its luxurious atmosphere.
• It has a range of environmental and sustainability features, including advanced waste management and energy-efficient systems.

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A Closer Look at the $200 Million Rising Sun Superyacht

There are a few different categories of yachts in the world. As a yacht enthusiast you might hear a few different terms being thrown around in the descriptions, such as Super yacht up to 100 feet in length or Mega yacht up to 300 feet. These are the larger water craft and there is even a giga yacht which are those that are over 300 feet in length. With this in mind, the Rising Sun, which is often referred to as a Super yacht far exceeds the parameters set for the classification, so if we're going to be particular about the classification, we'd call it a Giga yacht. However it's categorized, the Rising Sun is one of the most amazing private yachts afloat and we're going to take a closer look at the features which make this multi-million dollar ship so special.

Rising Sun Yacht built by Lurssen: A Celebrity Choice

This yacht has hosted some of the most celebrated personalities in the film and record industry as well as the political arena. Barack and Michelle Obama were seen vacationing on the Rising Sun in 2017, and it's also hosted Hollywood stars including Oprah Winfrey , Julia Roberts , Leonardo DeCaprio, Tom Hanks and others. The co-founder of Dreamworks, film producer and record executive David Geffen is the owner of the Rising Sun, which ranks as the 9th largest yacht in the world, currently. Depending on which source you consult, the cost to build this giant is estimated to be $200 million and some have it as high as $400 million but we believe that the base cost was the latter and the extra figures come from upgrades .

The history of the Rising Sun

The Rising Sun is the commissioned craft of its first owner Larry Ellison, who partnered with David Geffen and is the current CEO of the Oracle Corporation. He ordered the building of the ship from the German shipbuilding company Lürssen . The Rising Sun is the design of Jon Bannenberg, who has since passed away. The ship was delivered to Mr. Ellison in 2004, who shared ownership with David Geffen until 2010, when he decided that it was too large, so he sold his share to Geffen, who is now the sole owner of the yacht and Ellison bought a smaller yacht.

Specifications and details

The Rising Sun yacht is constructed of a strong aluminum superstructure with a displacement steel hull and teak decks, in accordance with Germanischer Lloyd classification society rules. The ship requires 4 MTU 12,061 horsepower diesel engines to propel it though the water. The average cruising speed is 26 knots and the top speed of the ship is 30 knots. To make the yacht more comfortable and safe in rough waters, it is fitted with zero speed stabilizers for times when she is at anchor. The Rising Sun measures 453.97 ft in length with a 62.34 ft beam, a draft of 16.08 ft and gross tonnage of 7841 tons. The exterior was designed by Bannenberg & Rowel and the interior by Seccombe Design. It was built by Lurssen and refit in 2004 and 2011. At the time of the sale it was the 6th largest yacht in the world, but other new superyachts have displaced it to the 9th position.

Luxury amenities

It takes a crew of 45 to maintain and operate this massive vessel and they are housed in 30 cabins. The guests are housed in 8 cabins which can accommodate between 16 and 18 guests comfortably. The yacht has been designed with more than 8,000m² of living space, allowing for larger gathering areas as well as plenty of places to find privacy from the crowd of guests. There are a total of five decks with 82 rooms aboard the yacht. Some of the luxury amenities include a spa and gym so guests don't need to miss out on their daily workout routines. The Rising Sun is also quipped with a lift/elevator to take guests between the five decks. For practicality so guests/owners can come and go from any location, there is also a helipad on board. For fun in the sun there is a swimming pool as well as underwater lights for excellent illumination, and a sauna for relaxation. The ship also features air conditioning throughout the 82 rooms so guests can achieve the optimal room temperatures, even on hot days at sea, and there is also a Tender Garage, as well as a Cinema large enough to accommodate all guests for entertainment.

Final thoughts

The Rising Sun has only had two owners since it was built in 2004. Co-owners Larry Ellison and David Geffen shared it for a period of time, then Ellison sold his share to Geffen who is now the sole owner. The yacht was once the sixth largest yacht in the world, but is still considered a wonder coming in at ninth place. It's packed to the hilt with luxury amenities and there is plenty of space aboard with five decks and 82 rooms. The ship which cost $200 million to build is now valued somewhere between $3 and $4 million, and it has only increased in value with the passage of time and no doubt numerous upgrades to suit the preferences of the owner. It's served as the vessel that provides a source of recreation for some of the most famous people in the world including some of our most beloved Hollywood stars and even a former president and first lady. The Rising Sun is truly one of the most magnificent yachts that has ever been created, and those who are fortunate enough to be invited on board are in for a top notch luxury experience.

Written by  Dana Hanson

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Hollywood billionaire David Geffen has been self-isolating on his superyacht in the Caribbean during the coronavirus pandemic. Take a look at the $590 million yacht.

• Billionaire David Geffen is in the hot seat for a "tone-deaf" Instagram post about isolating on his yacht, Rising Sun, in the Caribbean, The Guardian reported .
• Geffen reportedly paid $590 million for the yacht, which previously belonged to Oracle founder Larry Ellison .
• Rising Sun is something of a playground for the rich and famous, as Geffen has been known to host celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Leonardo DiCaprio on board.
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was spotted on the superyacht last summer.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Billionaire and entertainment mogul David Geffen is in the hot seat this week for a "tone-deaf" Instagram post about isolating on his $590 million yacht in the Caribbean during the coronavirus pandemic, The Guardian reported .

On Saturday, Geffen posted photos showing his  superyacht, Rising Sun, in the Grenadines with the caption, "Sunset last night. Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I hope everybody is staying safe." The backlash on Twitter was prompt, with people calling his post "shameful" and out of touch, reported Business Insider's Katie Warren . He appears to have since  deactivated his Instagram .

It's the same yacht that  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was spotted on in the Balearics, Spain, last summer. In a photo posted to Geffen's Instagram , Bezos was seen with his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez; the supermodel Karlie Kloss; and former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

But Bezos and crew aren't the first to cruise the high seas with Geffen, who appears to love hosting celebrities, musicians, and actors. Leonardo DiCaprio, Bradley Cooper, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack and Michelle Obama have also previously kicked back on Geffen's 400-foot-plus superyacht. 

Here's a look at Rising Sun — and the big names who have been on board.

The entertainment mogul David Geffen, founder of DreamWorks, SKG, Asylum Records, Geffen Records, and DGS Records, owns Rising Sun. According to Forbes, he's worth an estimated $7.8 billion.

Source : Forbes

The 454-foot megayacht was originally built for Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Geffen bought a half-share in 2007 and the other half in 2010, totaling $590 million.

Source :  Forbes

The exact value of the superyacht is unclear. However, a 2019 put its value at $300 million.

Source : Yacht Harbour

Rising Sun was constructed by the German shipbuilder Lurssen. Once Geffen became owner, he had the yacht refitted over a six-month period.

Source : Boat International

The yacht can accommodate 18 guests and a staff of 55 people. It even has a basketball court.

The top deck is dedicated entirely to the owner and includes a double-height cinema.

Geffen has cruised everywhere from St. Bart's and the Tobago Cays in the Caribbean to Portofino, Italy, and Ibiza, Spain, according to posts Business Insider previously viewed on his now-deactivated Instagram — but not without a few friends.

Rising Sun is a great place for entertaining. A scroll through Geffen's Instagram feed before it was deleted showed that he's hosted many a celebrity guest on board.

Oprah Winfrey, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Chris Rock, Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Hanks have all joined Geffen in cruising the high seas, according to now-deleted Instagram posts.

♥️ happiness entrepreneurs ♥️ A post shared by KATY PERRY (@katyperry) on Jul 28, 2019 at 8:57am PDT Jul 28, 2019 at 8:57am PDT

Source : Business Insider , GQ

But Geffen doesn't just invite actors and musicians on board. In 2017, Barack and Michelle Obama were spotted on board while the yacht was in French Polynesia.

Source : Business Insider

And in summer 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, investment banker Lloyd Blankfein, and supermodel Karlie Kloss were spotted aboard in the Balearics in Spain.

But Geffen likely won't have any friends on board anytime soon during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Saturday, he posted a photo to his Instagram from Rising Sun. The caption read: "Sunset last night. Isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I hope everybody is staying safe."

Twitter lit up with backlash, with people calling his post "shameful" and out of touch. Geffen then deleted his Instagram.

—Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) March 28, 2020

Source : Twitter

While the combined $590 million that Geffen spent to buy Rising Sun is an astronomical figure, it pales in comparison to the world's most expensive yacht. That title goes to the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich's yacht Eclipse, which is estimated to be worth anywhere from $600 million to $1.5 billion.

Source: Business Insider

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RISING SUN Yacht – Exceptional $400M Superyacht

RISING SUN yacht is currently the 16th largest motor yacht in the world at a length of 138.6 meters (454 ft).

She was built by Luerssen in Bremen, Germany, and launched in June of 2004.

RISING SUN yacht interior

The interior of the RISING SUN yacht was styled by Seccombe Design, a small and highly specialized design company. The 138.6 meter-long vessel was their largest project to date. She was last refitted in 2011 and fully updated to fit modern standards. The interior of RISING SUN is classically styled with lots of dark elements and wooden features.

She comes with a gym, a grand piano, multiple swimming pools, a beauty salon, and a spa which includes a sauna.

Sixteen guests can be welcomed aboard the super yacht’s eight suites. A further 45 crew members find space in 30 cabins below the deck.

Specifications

The RISING SUN yacht is powered by four MTU engines which allow her to reach top speeds of up to 30 knots although her cruising speed lies at 26 knots.

She was built by Luerssen , one of the most famous shipyards for luxury yachts in the world. Her total volume lies at 7841 tons making her one of the largest motor yachts in the world not only by length but also weight.

Her beam measures 19 meters (62.4 ft) and her draft is 4.85 meters (15.1 ft). The built-in at-anchor stabilizers allow her guests to be comfortable even during rough seas.

The exterior of the RISING SUN yacht was developed by the superyacht designers Bannenberg & Rowell.

Dickie Baneberg’s father was one of the most legendary designers of all time in the industry, sometimes even called the father of yacht design.

His son is continuing his legacy and elements of Jon Bannenberg’s style can still be recognized in this work. With her many separate windows RISING SUN almost looks like a small cruise ship.

She is all-white, in classical yacht design with a steel hull and aluminum superstructure. In addition to her covered decks, she features a large open-air space at the bow as well as one at the aft of the vessel.

The RISING SUN yacht originally cost an estimated US $200 million when she was launched in 2004. However, due to refits and sales RISING SUN is now valued at a price of US $570 million.

Her annual running costs lie somewhere between US $25 and 40 million.

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Iconic yachts: Inside the design journey of the 138m Lürssen superyacht Rising Sun

Rising Sun was the last yacht that ever came from designer Jon Bannenberg’s drawing board (literally, as the office was then an almost CAD-free zone), and one that he was destined never to see completed.

To a degree, Rising Sun represented a back-to-basics approach and a final opportunity to work with Lürssen’s lean destroyer-type hull, which had been the platform 30 years earlier for Carinthia V and Carinthia VI (now named The One ). The similarities ended there. Rising Sun experimented with extensive use of structural glass for a clean and stripped-down profile that involved Lürssen and its sub-contractors working on engineering and systems.

Jon Bannenberg’s appointment to design Rising Sun came out of the blue after Larry Ellison had commissioned a number of studies from different designers. None seemed to have the impact that he wanted until Jon Bannenberg unveiled his initial study model one morning in London over a couple of lattes. Things moved quickly after that, and they reached an agreement in two emails without even a hint of a lawyer being involved. LE120 became the project’s codename but it did not need Enigma codebreaking skills among the yachting community to work out the vessel’s length and who had commissioned her.

Jon Bannenberg worked on many study models in the early months, including a colossal version that was shipped to Lürssen and used for an initial presentation meeting with the principal sub-contractors. The basic form did not change much from his first drawing. Among the spectacular concepts was a suspended, tube-like walkway through the main machinery spaces for visitors to see exactly what drove her at speeds of 30 knots, and an exposed Z frame structure separating the tender launching areas. This was monumental in scale but sculptural and simple to fabricate.

The exposure of structure was one of the overarching themes of his Rising Sun design – no more clearly apparent than in the web frames of the superstructure, into which the full-height glass panels were set. The initial intent was to have these in raw finished aluminium, but this subsequently got ‘value engineered’ into a metallic paint finish.

His general arrangement layouts of Rising Sun gave spacious guest cabins direct access to the exterior side decks, protected from the weather by 45-degree indents in the superstructure. There was so much space to play with that the top deck was given over entirely to owner use, while a double-height cinema was embedded like the stone of an avocado, with the corridor arcing gently around it. And, of course, a basketball court was obligatory.

All in all, Jon Bannenberg’s original concept for Rising Sun survived relatively intact after his death. The yacht divided opinion, like many of his designs, and her sheer scale – eventually growing to 138 metres – made even Larry Ellison pause for thought. But she is certainly a Bannenberg original, and somehow neatly completed the circle that started with Carinthia V and Lürssen some 30 years earlier.

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Massive yacht turns heads along portland waterfront.

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Maine is known for its waterfront, and places like Portland are certainly no stranger to massive cruise ships and luxury yachts.

But a boat that has been docked in Portland for the last several days is certainly turning some heads.

The "Rising Sun" is owned by billionaire media mogul David Geffen. The so-called giga-yacht is one of the 20 largest yachts in the world.

It is 452 feet long, and five stories high with 82 rooms, a spa, a movie theater, a wine cellar and a full-sized basketball court. It staffs a crew of 45 people.

Many people have been heading to the Portland waterfront just to get a look.

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RISING SUN yacht NOT for charter*

138.6m  /  454'9 | lurssen | 2004 / 2011.

Owner & Guests

Cabin Configuration

• Previous Yacht

Special Features:

• Elevator for easy access between floors
• State-of-the-art cinema
• Swimming pool
• Germanischer Lloyd classification
• Cruising speed of 26 knots

The 138.6m/454'9" motor yacht 'Rising Sun' was built by Lurssen in Germany at their Bremen shipyard. Her interior is styled by design house Seccombe Design and she was delivered to her owner in June 2004. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Bannenberg & Rowell and she was last refitted in 2011.

Guest Accommodation

Rising Sun has been designed to comfortably accommodate up to 18 guests in 9 suites. She is also capable of carrying up to 45 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

Her features include a movie theatre, beauty salon, elevator, underwater lights, gym and air conditioning.

Range & Performance

Rising Sun is built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, with teak decks. Powered by 4 x diesel MTU (20V 8000 M70) 20-cylinder 11,149hp engines running at 1150rpm, she comfortably cruises at 26 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 30 knots. Rising Sun features at-anchor stabilizers providing exceptional comfort levels. Her water tanks store around 100,000 Litres of fresh water. She was built to Germanischer Lloyd classification society rules.

*Charter Rising Sun Motor Yacht

Motor yacht Rising Sun is currently not believed to be available for private Charter. To view similar yachts for charter , or contact your Yacht Charter Broker for information about renting a luxury charter yacht.

Rising Sun Yacht Owner, Captain or marketing company

'Yacht Charter Fleet' is a free information service, if your yacht is available for charter please contact us with details and photos and we will update our records.

Rising Sun Photos

Rising Sun Awards & Nominations

• International Superyacht Society Awards 2019 Best Refit Finalist

NOTE to U.S. Customs & Border Protection

Specification

M/Y Rising Sun

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The Good Life Aquatic

By Mark Seal

‘Have you ever seen anything so cool in your life? ” Jamie Edmiston, the 29-year-old super-yacht broker, has to shout, for we are in a Eurocopter EC130 over the ocean off Antibes, on our way to a yacht called Senses. It’s May of last year, and all the giant luxury boats are clustered on the Côte d’Azur for the Cannes Film Festival and the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. Having wintered in Palm Beach, the Caribbean, and beyond, the crews have streaked across the Atlantic while their employers jetted over on their Gulfstreams, Citations, Boeing Business Jets, and Bombardier Global Expresses.

Edmiston and I have taken off from the so-called Quai des Milliardaires (“Dock of the Billionaires”) at the International Yacht Club of Antibes, which was begun in 1999 to berth the big boats. As we fly over the seagoing behemoths, Edmiston points certain ones out: the Leander, parking-lot tycoon Sir Donald Gosling’s stately home on water; Aussie Rules, built by golf star Greg Norman and recently sold to Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, which has a swimming pool, a movie theater, and a dozen smaller boats on board; Sokar, the pride of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, on which his son, Dodi, and Princess Diana spent their last days, in 1997.

We’re 12 miles offshore, the minimum requirement for a helicopter to land on a boat along the Riviera, approaching Senses, a 194-foot exploration yacht, one of the largest in the world, with interiors by Philippe Starck and an abundance of “toys,” a yachting term that can mean anything from a Jet Ski to a submarine. Edmiston cries, “Look at the dolphins!” The copter tilts sideways, and I can see dozens of dolphins, leaping into the air and leading us straight toward the boat, as if they had been sent to fetch us. When we land on the fourth and uppermost deck, the yacht’s co-owner, Alan Gibbs, 65, the New Zealand inventor, takeover artist, and telecommunications mogul, is standing there in his bathing suit with two ravishing young women in string bikinis at his side—Emma, his daughter, a neuroscientist, and Sandra Baker, his Tahitian girlfriend.

Gibbs leads us to the sundeck for lunch. “It’s about freedom to, not freedom from, ” he says to explain the thrill of owning a yacht. “We’re free to do, free to go, is how I see it. We’re not going to fly to the moon from here. But it would be hard to find a better way to explore the earth than on this.”

The boat beneath us is a $40 million Goliath with a 120-ton fuel tank that costs $80,000 to fill and can keep the yacht at sea for a good part of the summer. Gibbs has taken Senses halfway around the world. “We were the first large yacht that actually visited Tunisia,” he says. “They couldn’t quite cope with it. The helicopter just drove them nuts—that some private person would have a ship that looked like the navy and wanted to fly all over Tunisia in a helicopter.”

Suddenly he shouts, “Get the toys in the water!” There is an instant buzz of walkie-talkies, and 14 crew members scurry out. Up goes the yacht’s helicopter, and down go the 42-foot tender, the 32-foot sailing yacht, and six Jet Skis. Then Gibbs yells, “Launch the Aquada!” A hatch opens, and the world’s first high-speed amphibious car, Gibbs’s invention, seven years in development and coming to the market soon, glides down a ramp into the sea. As its wheels retract, it turns into a speedboat. Gibbs drives, and the women sit atop bucket seats, spume wetting their hair as they seem to push the limits of extravagance. Back on board minutes later, Gibbs says, “That was really James Bond stuff out there. But Bond is only mucking it up. We’re really doing it!”

‘Ever larger boats have replaced palaces, estates, and art as the ultimate symbols of wealth, which is not altogether surprising, given the fleeting and disposable nature of our society,” says Mark Getty, the son of Sir J. Paul Getty Jr., as he shows me around Talitha G, which was launched in 1929 by the head of Packard, sold to the chief of Woolworth’s, requisitioned by the U.S. Navy during World War II, rescued by Saturday Night Fever movie producer Robert Stigwood, and immaculately restored by J. Paul Getty Jr. in 1993. Named for his second wife, Talitha G has six staterooms, open fireplaces, Lalique glass doors, period art and furnishings, and the latest technology. Hollywood superstars and captains of industry can charter her for $350,000 a week, excluding gas and gratuities.

It’s the day of the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo, and from *Talitha’*s aft deck Mark Getty and I are gazing out on a sea full of super-yachts. We can hear the Formula One race cars buzzing around curving hillsides above us and the crowd’s cheers. But the bigger race is definitely here in the harbor, Port Hercule, where 111 boats pack every available slip—at a cost of $25,000 to $50,000 a week each—while dozens more that can’t find space or are just too big to fit are moored around the harbor’s rim. As big as cruise ships, super-yachts have names to match— Giant, Kingdom 5KR, Hedonist, Huntress, Limitless, Seawolfe, Passion, Nectar of the Gods, Naughty by Nature, Big Roi.

Sir J. Paul Getty Jr.'s Talitha G , restored in 1993 by the late Jon Bannenberg, long considered the world's foremost yacht designer.

In order to see them up close, I descend three decks and get into a Wally Tender, the motorboat used to ferry owners, guests, crew, and supplies from ship to shore and yacht to yacht. Like everything else in yachting, the Wally Tender is over the top; this $670,000 propeller-powered Batmobile is considered a necessary accessory by everyone from the designer Valentino to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. I’m traveling with Luca Bassani, the owner of Wally Yachts, who has revolutionized yachting, first with sailing yachts and then with power ones. He slams the tender into gear, and the boat almost levitates, quickly bringing us right up alongside the huge vessels.

They rise up from the ocean like monoliths. There’s the vanilla-colored, $100 million Pelorus (378 feet), one of four super- yachts owned by the Russian oil billionaire Roman Abramovich. Pelorus is equipped with bulletproof glass, a missile-detection system, two helicopters, a submarine, and high-intensity “paparazzi lights,” designed to obliterate the film of any interloping photographer. Beyond that is Lady Moura (344 feet), owned by Saudi billionaire Dr. Nasser al-Rashid, with an 80-member crew, a fully equipped hospital, an onboard sand beach, and a 59-foot dining table. Next is Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos’s 379-foot Atlantis II, which has rarely left the harbor since his death, in 1996. Then comes Delphine, launched in 1921 by American automobile magnate Horace Dodge and requisitioned by Franklin Roosevelt for meetings with Winston Churchill and Vyacheslav Molotov during World War II; restored, it rents for $60,000 a day.

Moored outside the port is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Octopus, making its debut in the Mediterranean, having just sailed from New Orleans, where Allen used the boat to promote his company’s new software at a convention of cable-TV executives. Built at a cost that reportedly escalated from $250 to $400 million, with a crew of 60 that includes former navy SEALs, Octopus is, at 413 feet, the world’s largest privately owned yacht, so huge that the lifeboats strapped to its side look like tiny toys. Anchored by means of a dynamic positioning system that enables the captain to stop with perfect precision, it’s a skyscraper with seven decks, two helicopter landing pads, a swimming pool, a basketball court, an infirmary, a garage, a movie theater, and, in its belly, a port to house many of the 14 tenders. These include a custom-built submarine that can remain underwater with 10 people for two weeks and a remote-controlled robot for exploring the ocean floor. There’s a concert space for 260, a massive guitar sculpture that rises up through the entire height of the boat, and a recording studio, which is a second home to musicians ranging from Dan Aykroyd to Robbie Robertson. On the lowest level is an observation lounge with a glass bottom and stadium-strength lighting that illuminates the depths, for watching sea creatures.

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This colossus has everything on it but torpedoes, which Allen declined when the builder suggested them for security. Meanwhile, Allen’s great rival, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, has just completed Rising Sun, 47 critical feet longer than Octopus, a new record for length. As J. P. Morgan once said when asked about the cost of his yacht, Corsair III, which, at 300 feet and with a crew of 70, was the world’s largest in the early 1900s, “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”

In the shadow of these monsters in the harbor is an array of smaller yachts, which are still big enough to be classified as “mega-,” or “super-,” a category that includes all powerboats and sailboats more than 80 feet long, according to Diane Byrne of Power & Motoryacht magazine. There are between 5,000 and 6,000 super-yachts in the world, and the number is growing steadily—622 were launched in 2003 alone.

“It’s a grand traveling home,” says Dr. Charles Simonyi, one of the pioneers of Microsoft and a driving force behind the invention of its Excel program, as he relaxes on the sundeck of *Skat—*Danish for “my darling.” A slate-gray, 231-foot vessel that is sometimes mistaken for a battleship, it serves as the bachelor’s home and office six months of the year. Decorated with Victor Vasarely and Roy Lichtenstein paintings and Arne Jacobsen “egg” chairs, Skat is the result of Simonyi’s failed search for satisfying apartments. “I tried Montréal, I tried Monte Carlo, I tried Copenhagen,” he says. But why, he finally decided, join the dogfight for locations and suffer the indignities of local taxes, constant maintenance, and zoning restrictions when you can sail into the heart of the capitals of the world on a luxurious, fully staffed fortress? “In all of the Scandinavian capitals—Oslo as well as Copenhagen and Stockholm—we are always docked next to the king’s or queen’s palace,” he says. “We are occupying the best real estate, and I have the nicest bathroom and a fantastic restaurant.” Although Simonyi insists that he uses Skat as a base to run his businesses, life on board most boats is pretty sybaritic—breakfast until noon, lunch until 3, cocktails at 6, dinner until 12, and drinks until dawn.

When the Grand Prix winner is announced, every yacht in the harbor blasts its horn, and they sound like an armada of whales, drowning out the applause coming from Monte Carlo’s natural amphitheater above. Within hours most of the boats will depart, untangling themselves from one another’s anchor lines and heading out to sea.

If you don’t own a yacht, you can always charter one, at prices ranging from $203,000 a week for the 175-foot Perfect Prescription (which Jaguar leased and lent to Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Matt Damon during the filming of Ocean’s Twelve ) to $850,000 a week for Annaliesse, a 279-footer with 18 staterooms (instead of the usual 12). On the day of my visit, Annaliesse has been chartered for a wedding. Lionel Richie is on board to serenade the party, and the bride and groom and 100 guests arrive by helicopter, all of them dressed in white bathrobes.

With the exception of Tiger Woods, who owns a 155-foot boat he christened Privacy, celebrities tend to lease or rent. Denzel and Pauletta Washington rent a yacht almost every summer; so do Magic Johnson, rap star Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. If you can’t charter, you can visit friends who do or, as they say in the yachting world, go hopping. “Yacht-hopping,” explains fashion model Naomi Campbell, who took her first cruise a decade ago, on Mohamed Al Fayed’s yacht. When I meet her, she’s staying on Formula One racing impresario Flavio Briatore’s Lady in Blue. Today, she says, she’ll hop from Lady in Blue to Valentino’s TM Blue One to the Brazilian party boat called Bossa Nova. “Boat to boat,” she says. “It’s disgusting. When I say, ‘yacht-hopping,’ I mean I go to say hi to my friends.”

Darwin Deason with his partner, Katerina Panos and their crew and security force, ready to greet guests for cocktails.

I’ve been invited to spend some time on the Apogee, at 205 feet the 62nd-largest yacht in the world, according to *Power & Motoryacht’*s 2004 rankings. It cost $50 million and charters for $320,000 a week. “Welcome to the Apogee, ” says the steward who scoops up my luggage from the dock at Cagnes sur Mer and deposits it in a tender. Speeding through the soup of Jet Skis, minnow speedboats, and midsize yachts, I can see the Apogee and its owner, Dallas-based international computer-services titan Darwin Deason, and his glamorous partner, Katerina Panos, waving from the aft deck. They are flanked by the 17-member crew, standing in two neat lines.

They greet every guest this way, 12 of us all together, with the whole crew shaking our hands and introducing themselves before they escort us to the six guest staterooms, each named for a Greek island. Our bags are unpacked for us, and Deason gives us a tour of the interior’s 26,000 square feet: the wood-paneled upstairs and downstairs saloons, the Apogee Club Bar, the disco dance floor with a Wurlitzer juke-box, the formal dining room—all the way up to the fourth-level sundeck, where we forgo the fully equipped gym and the 12-person Jacuzzi to bake in the sun until cocktails are served. By then the twin Caterpillar engines are purring and we’re cruising the five miles to Monte Carlo.

‘A yacht is a demonstration of wealth,” says yacht broker Nicholas Edmiston, Jamie’s father. Formerly C.E.O. of the venerable yacht-sales-and-charter company Camper & Nicholsons, Edmiston created his own business in 1996 to focus on selling and chartering “really big yachts,” which he says means upwards of 150 feet. Business is booming, with yacht construction up 22 percent over last year and a $950 million increase in sales, according to industry experts. “There has been a huge expansion in big yachts over the past six to seven years, with even bigger ones on the drawing board,” says Edmiston. “More than ever in history—because we’ve got more rich people. A yacht is probably the most expensive single purchase that anyone is ever going to make.”

Nothing else comes close. A jet? A mansion? They are mere starter kits for yacht enthusiasts. “There was a huge prime estate that just came on the market in England—3,600 acres, the most beautiful grade-one house, designed by Sir Christopher Wren’s protégé. Immaculate. And that is $75 to $80 million. I’m selling yachts today for $150 to $200 million.” He looks out over the port of Monte Carlo. “I always say to people, ‘Never spend more than 10 percent of your net worth on buying a yacht.’ So the guy that wants to buy a yacht for $25 million is worth $250 million.”

Time is of the essence, Edmiston says, because once you have enough money to buy a boat, chances are you don’t have nearly enough years left to enjoy it. “From the beginning of the planning to taking delivery is three to four years,” he says. “So if you’re the 67-year-old billionaire standing on the dock here with a young woman on your arm and she says, ‘Honey, I’d love one of those!,’ can he risk waiting four years to get it built? Or is it better to say to the guy who just paid 50 million for a new yacht, ‘How about if I give you 65?’ I know what I’d do.” A new yacht from a German or Dutch shipyard can appreciate approximately 25 percent the minute it hits the water, he says.

“Roughly 10 percent of the price of the yacht is what it costs every year to run it,” adds Edmiston, listing the costs: captain and crew (plus helicopter pilots, personal maids, guides, masseuses, hairdressers, etc.), insurance, harbor fees, maintenance, fuel—which industry experts say can run as high as $300,000 for a summer’s fill-up for Paul Allen’s Octopus. Edmiston motions across the harbor to a 300-footer. “To paint a yacht like that is around $4 to $5 million,” he says. “Of course, you don’t have to do it every year.”

Most owners charter their yachts, but the super-rich never do; they want them in constant readiness. “I was on a big yacht down in Sardinia not long ago, and the owner was complaining that he couldn’t get any decent fresh fruit,” says Edmiston. “It’s a nice place, Sardinia, but not really noted for agriculture. So there was a helicopter on the yacht, which I sent to the market in Cannes, a 400-mile round-trip. He got his raspberries and strawberries and was very happy.” The fruit probably cost $4,000 in fuel and other expenses. “Who cares?” says Edmiston. “What I cared about is that the owner got what he wanted.”

‘This yacht took two years in dreaming, three years in building,” says Mexico City industrialist Carlos Peralta, standing on his seventh boat, a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted fantasy called Princess Mariana, for his wife. It has six decks, six bars, 1,600 movies, 16,000 pre-programmed songs, three chefs, a cellar with 2,000 bottles of wine and 1,000 bottles of tequila, a laundry, a wall that opens to turn a bedroom into a terrace, and such high-tech features as fingerprint-identification pads to secure staterooms and other areas. We’re bobbing in the bay off the Hôtel du Cap, surrounded by yachts, including Barry Diller’s two-masted ketch, The Mikado. Peralta tells me that covetous Saudi princes have been circling his boat all week in powerboats, and that he has turned down several offers to sell it at an enormous profit. “It’s the most expensive thing you can build,” he says, “but it gives you pleasure like nothing else.”

“I’ve bought a second boat that I call the Lady Lola Shadow, a 186-foot, 20-year-old supply vessel, and I’ve just loaded her with toys,” says Idaho-based newspaper magnate Duane Hagadone, who, in commissioning his 205-foot Lady Lola, admonished the designers, “Give me some sizzle!” The result includes the 18-hole Lady Lola Golf Club, where golfers hit floating golf balls off a retractable tee on the sundeck toward 18 floating pins and have their games tracked by satellite and displayed on a television screen. “The second boat follows along behind the Lady Lola. I’ve got a custom-made wooden boat, a 150-mile-per-hour speedboat, a submarine, landing boats, canoes, kayaks—17 boats, plus the helicopter, in the Lady Lola fleet.”

“Most people don’t even know they want a yacht,” international boat broker Steve Kidd says of his clientele, powerhouses who think they’ve done it all until someone leads them onto a yacht and into another dimension. “Fifty kilograms of Iranian beluga at $500,000, 300 bottles of Dimple scotch, 300 bottles of Johnny Walker Black, 50 cases of champagne, 40 pounds of foie gras, close to 100 pounds of Niman Ranch beef—bill just shy of a million,” says a provisioner of one boat owner’s memorable order. London-based designer Donald Starkey adds, “I’ve personally put on one yacht alone a Picasso, a Dubuffet, two Utrillos, two or three Chagalls, and more. The value of the art is probably three times the value of the yacht.” Valentino’s rep Carlos Souza says, “Whenever guests come to TM Blue One, they make sure they pack lots of cashmere, because Valentino likes the temperature subzero, the air-conditioning running full blast.” Public-relations executive Lara Shriftman tells me, “On one boat I went on, they had a different set of designer china for every single meal. The crew cleaned the boat morning, noon, and night. In the bathrooms they had 20 different kinds of shampoo in a basket for a lot of high-maintenance girls. All the linens were Pratesi—600-thread count.”

What is it about a yacht that bewitches the super-rich? “Abandonment, an immediate yes,” says the actor George Hamilton without hesitation. King Edward VIII engaged in his romance with Wallis Simpson, which led to his abdication, during a 1936 charter on a steam yacht called Nahlin. But the allure of a yacht goes beyond mere romance. Occidental Petroleum magnate Armand Hammer had three wives, but the only photograph he carried in his wallet was of his yacht, according to Nancy Holmes in her book The Dream Boats. Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, whose yachts included Agneta, a teak beauty with rust-colored sails, liked to say, “You can tell what a man is like only by his boat and his woman.”

After dining on Gloria and Loel Guinness’s yacht, Sarina, in the 60s, Elizabeth Taylor told Richard Burton she wanted one. “We chartered a sweet old lady, whose original name I’ve forgotten, to go to the Greek islands,” Taylor tells me, describing the dilapidated, 165-foot motor yacht built in 1906 that she and Burton bought for $200,000. They named her Kalizma, an acronym for their children Kate, Liza, and Maria, and spent a reported $2 million in restoration. “She wasn’t pretty at all on the interior—all navy and nautical trim—and yet there was something so charming about her. Richard and I fell in love with her immediately, although it meant doing a complete revamp. I hired a decorator and asked him to remove every trace of the nautical theme. We put in diesel engines and stabilizers and transformed her into a cozy, comfortable, pretty little house, very romantic and colorful. We hung our paintings in the dining saloon and put Louis Quatorze chairs in the living room. The bedroom was all yellow and white. I think it was the prettiest one we ever had. There were rooms for all the kids, and we used her as a floating home. We took her up the Thames and kept all of our dogs on board because of the quarantine laws in England. Other boats would pass by and shout that we had the largest floating kennel in the world. She gave us more pleasure and fun and was the best present we ever gave each other.”

The exterior of the yacht, Christina O .

I’m on a tender off the coast of Cap-Ferrat, sailing toward the mother ship of super-yachts, the Christina O. On this 325-foot former Canadian Navy frigate, which Aristotle Onassis bought in 1954 for $34,000 and transformed at a cost of $4 million, the Greek tycoon invented yacht culture: living on his boat for months at a time, conducting his international business empire from his master suite, seducing in his “lucky” stateroom such fabled women as Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. “So this it seems is what it is to be a king,” Jackie Kennedy allegedly said when she first stepped onto the Christina in October 1963.

King Farouk called the Christina “the last word in opulence,” and in Jackie’s day it had a crew of 60, two French hairdressers, three chefs, a masseuse, a maid for each of the 12 staterooms, and a small orchestra. Restored for $50 million and relaunched as the Christina O in 2001 by a syndicate, the yacht was booked for a cruise for $1.54 million for two weeks during the 2004 Olympics, in Athens.

“This boat is a place of fire, burning fire, a place of romance, power, and beauty!” says Michel Blanchi, of the Christina O Partnership, as he takes me through the Callas Lounge, which has a Steinway piano in it; the Lapis Lounge, with its famous lapis lazuli fireplace; the aft deck, with the hydraulic swimming pool whose bottom rises to become a dance floor; the master suite, with a painting by Renoir in it; and into Ari’s Bar. The handles on the bar are whales’ teeth carved with pornographic scenes from The Odyssey, and the seats are covered in the foreskins of whales’ penises. Once, leading Garbo to the bar, Onassis said, “I’m going to sit you on the biggest prick in the world.” She responded, “Mr. Onassis, you are a presumptuous man.” But she soon succumbed to his advances.

Onassis’s arch-enemy, fellow Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos, not only married Onassis’s first wife, Tina, but also had the gall to compete with him in boats. When Onassis converted the Canadian frigate Stormont into the Christina, he added about 30 feet so that it would be bigger than Niarchos’s boat. When Niarchos dared to build an even bigger yacht, the Atlantis II, 55 feet longer than the Christina, with a gyroscopically controlled swimming pool whose water remained steady in rough seas, Onassis went ballistic. “I was actually there, and Onassis was furious!” says Peter Evans, author of two books about him, Ari and Nemesis. “Making phone calls around the world, to see if he could get a gyroscope adapted for his pool.” Evans smiles. “Rivalries and silliness. But it mattered to these people.”

Left, a spiral staircase on the Christina O , the Onassis yacht; Right, the notorious bar on the Christina O , with barstools covered in the foreskins of whales' penises; here Aristotle Onassis romanced such fabled women as Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis unwittingly became a bellwether of the coming craze for yacht supremacy. Having heard all about her husband’s sexual conquests on the Christina, Evans says, she almost persuaded him to sell it and design a new yacht from scratch, to be called Jacqueline. She even had the perfect designer to suggest: Jon Bannenberg.

‘Nobody needs a yacht,” Jon Bannenberg liked to say, so instead of designing yachts for practicality, he created yachts that spoke to his clients’ dreams. “He opened the floodgate of imagination,” says Jim Gilbert, the founder of ShowBoats International magazine. “When he came into the business, teak and mahogany were the only woods; blue and white and the occasional forest green were the only colors. This guy starts telling people that the same principles that apply to fashion should apply to yachts, that a yacht should stimulate all of the senses, not just the nautical senses.” One Dutch shipyard added $1 million to the cost of every Bannenberg-designed yacht for what it called “the Bannenberg factor.”

“My father never lost sight of the fact that all of us in this amazing business owe our livelihoods to people who spend, well, you know the sums, so he always made the whole process the most fantastic, exciting experience,” says Dickie Bannenberg, who has run Jon Bannenberg Ltd. since shortly before his father’s death, in 2002. A Sydney-born interior designer, Jon Bannenberg began his yacht-designing career in the early 1960s, when one of the clients of his London firm asked him what he thought about the plans for the yacht he was building. “It’s terrible,” Bannenberg said. When the client dared him to do better, Bannenberg did, and thereby embarked on a career that would span four decades and the creation of about 200 yachts. He introduced many of the features that are standard on today’s big vessels: bold hull and window shapes, split-level saloons, elevators, back stairs for crew, his-and-her baths, movie theaters, and such special touches as aft-deck garages for automobiles.

His creations included Carinthia V, for German retail tycoon Helmut Horten (who, after it sank on its maiden voyage, commanded Bannenberg to build another, bigger and faster); the Highlander, for Malcolm Forbes; the Lady Ghislaine, for British media baron Robert Maxwell (whose drowning off the yacht in 1991 remains a mystery); the Southern Cross III, for Alan Bond, the Australian industrialist who won the America’s Cup; the restoration of Talitha G, for Sir J. Paul Getty Jr.; and the 316-foot Limitless, for the Limited-store magnate Leslie Wexner.

The yacht that shocked everyone was the $70 million Nabila, which Bannenberg designed for Adnan Khashoggi. When it was launched, in 1979, it was the most opulent yacht in the world. Nabila Khashoggi, the daughter of the notorious arms dealer, meets me in a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, in her home base of Los Angeles. In her mind the Nabila is as new as it was on the day it was launched, when she was 15. “Your baba made a boat!” she remembers being told before being led, with her eyes covered, by her stepmother, Lamia, and her nanny to a slip at the Benetti shipyard in Viareggio, Italy, where the Nabila stood on stilts. “I opened my eyes and . . . first, the size!” she remembers. “I just burst into tears.”

The 270-foot silver yacht had twin engine exhausts that resembled wings, a crew of 40, three chefs, 11 staterooms, a helicopter, a movie theater, a disco, a hospital with rotating crews of surgeons (and coffins, just in case), 296 telephones, and a fortune in revolving art. “It looked like a silver bullet,” Nabila remembers. When it was launched, hundreds of doves were released and priests and imams said prayers. Soon celebrities the world over began streaming on board, and spectators packed docks whenever the vessel pulled into port.

“I went on the Nabila with Elizabeth Taylor,” says George Hamilton. “A plane was sent for us. You would have thought you were landing on the Titanic. I don’t think Elizabeth ever wanted to leave. There were helicopters that would take you wherever; if you wanted to go to another country, you were on a plane in 15 minutes.”

Khashoggi also filled his yacht with a steady supply of beautiful, consenting young women. “Oh, definitely,” Nabila says. “My father certainly lives life to the fullest, but there’s an elegance about him. So it wasn’t like a frat party. But there were a lot of girls . . . when my stepmother wasn’t there.”

The party ended in 1989, when Khashoggi was jailed on charges of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. (He was acquitted the following year.) The first thing to go was the yacht, which he sold to Donald Trump for $25 million, after deducting $1 million on the assurance that Trump would change its name. Trump called it Trump Princess. The vessel was later sold to Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, currently the world’s fourth-richest man, according to Forbes, who renamed it Kingdom 5-KR and who also bought Trump’s stake in the Plaza hotel. “If I wanted revenge on Donald, I’d marry this guy and get everything back,” Ivana Trump said as a joke while I was interviewing her about her own yacht, M/Y Ivana.

“Just recently, I was walking with my father on the Croisette, in Cannes, and Prince Alwaleed was sitting at a coffee shop, and the Nabila, now the Kingdom, was in the bay,” says Nabila Khashoggi. “He invited us to sit with him, so there were the three of us sitting and talking about the boat, how beautiful it was. It was very sweet, because to me Prince Alwaleed called his boat the Nabila. ”

Size matters is the message on Michael Breman’s T-shirt. Breman is sales director of Lürssen, the German shipyard, and we are bobbing on a dinghy beneath the blue bow of Paul Allen’s Octopus. Lürssen built it as well as Larry Ellison’s Rising Sun, and “Size matters” is the shipyard’s unofficial slogan. Beside Breman is Espen Øino, the Antibes-based designer of Octopus and other breakthrough yachts. They were together in Øino’s office in 1998 when the “brief,” or purchaser’s outline for a new yacht, came through Øino’s fax machine.

“Wow, this is the boat I would build if I had the money,” Breman remembers saying when he read the fax, although the two men refuse to identify the client and will discuss only the yacht, which several other designers and shipyards also made bids to build. “The client didn’t want a flashy little Mickey Mouse yacht,” says Breman. “He wanted a yacht in ship’s clothing,” says Øino.

As we circle Octopus, we can see many of the 46 antennae for every imaginable communications device as well as the two life-boats capable of rescuing the crew of 57 and 26 guests. Using the Finnish icebreaker Fennica as a model, Øino won the commission for the boat, which took three years to build. As always, Breman consulted his daughter, Josi, then seven, when he was trying to come up with a name. “Octopus,” she said, and the name stuck.

Like Allen, Larry Ellison had been stricken by the notion of the perfect yacht. Like Allen, too, he already had three yachts, including the Katana, formerly owned by Mexican TV titan Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, who pushed his designer, Martin Francis, to create a wonder, according to Øino, who worked on the boat with Francis. “He said, I am a very private person and I don’t want to be seen. But when I do go to port, I want my presence to be felt through my boat.’” The result was one of the world’s fastest and most stylish vessels, with a gas-turbine jet engine, three decks of cyclopean windows, and a 260-foot oil tanker so that El Tigre, as Azcárraga was known, could refuel at sea. Ellison bought the yacht from Azcárraga’s estate in 1998 for $25 million, spent $35 million overhauling it, and recently sold it for $68 million. But this almost perfect yacht only “drove him to contemplate what the perfect boat would be like,” Matthew Symonds writes in Softwar, his biography of Ellison. The perfect yacht would be “a proper ship, not some ghastly floating palace,” Ellison told Symonds. After interviewing every conceivable designer, Ellison walked into Jon Bannenberg’s office off London’s Kings Road in late 1999 and found the man to interpret his dreams.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's 413-foot Octopus has seven decks, two helipads, and a concert space for 260.

Bannenberg didn’t live to see *Rising Sun’*s completion, but he finished the design. “It’s not only the greatest yacht that I have ever built but the greatest that has ever been built in the tradition of great yachts going back to 1810,” he told Symonds.

A longtime bitter rival of Paul Allen’s in business and yacht racing, Ellison originally called the boat by the code name LE120, for its 120-meter length (393 feet). But Ellison eventually decided to extend Rising Sun to 460 feet, 47 feet longer than Allen’s Octopus. “The boat is very beautiful—a kinetic sculpture made of metal and glass,” Ellison told Symonds. “But in a post September eleventh world it seems excessive. Now everything that’s not essential seems excessive. Beautiful gardens and beautiful boats have lost their place in the dangerous new world we live in. They no longer promise an escape from the world. There is no escape anymore.”

The race, however, is hardly over. “I’m presently designing a yacht that will outsize Rising Sun considerably, but I can’t tell you any more,” Espen Øino informs me.

In addition to luxury and size, the super-yachtsman yearns for speed. Larry Ellison almost died for it, pushing himself and his crew to sail through a hurricane-force storm in which five boats sank, six men died, and at least 55 sailors had to be rescued by helicopter, to win the Sydney-to-Hobart race in 1998.

Robert Miller, the Hong Kong based owner of Duty Free Shoppers, the international chain of stores, forsakes everything for speed. “He likes the action, the shit fight, when things get hairy,” says the captain of the Mari-Cha IV, the world’s fastest monohull racing yacht, of his boss and skipper. An engine-room fire 400 miles off the coast of Brazil, sharks in Madagascar, and hellish storms around Cape Horn are all occasions to which Miller has risen. His captain, Jef D’Etiveaud, says that the 72-year-old tycoon is happiest when awakened in his bunk—a hammock swinging in an otherwise empty cell—to steer his ship through a churning sea.

“When you get to a certain speed, she sings, she tingles, and she roars—she loves the speed,” the soft-spoken, Massachusetts-born Miller tells me as we step onto his yacht, a 140-foot sailboat emblazoned with a red dragon logo, which he commissioned at a cost of roughly $10 million for one purpose only: to break world records. (Most recently he did the San Francisco to Hawaii run in just over five days.) He can have all the comfort he needs on his other boat, Mari-Cha III, with its museum-quality art, John Munford interiors, and Honduran mahogany paneling, in the company of his Ecuadoran wife, Chantal, and their three daughters and 10 grandchildren.

On his racing yacht, Miller does whatever it takes to win: spending weeks with his crew of up to 26 (which has included his son-in-law Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece), rationing water, eating freeze-dried astronaut food, and living in a stripped-clean hull with nothing to weigh it down. Miller is proud of his current dominance in racing, and he’d like to see if he can break the monohull record for sailing around the world, which stands at 93 days. He expects Mari-Cha IV to continue winning for at least another year, by which time someone will have managed to build a faster boat. “I’ll be very unhappy,” says Miller, knowing that when that happens he’ll be back at the drawing board.

‘I’m on the world’s most luxurious sailing yacht, and I have to live up to it,” says Mouna Ayoub as the moon rises over Cap-Ferrat and her stewards serve us a six-course extravaganza of nouvelle-French fish dishes on the everyday Christofle by Bernardaud china—not the 150-year-old Meissen, which is reserved for royalty. Our hostess is wearing white fox, a Galliano gown, and big diamonds, and we are on Phocea, her magnificently restored four-masted schooner, which has a 16-member crew and sycamore interiors by Viscount David Linley, nephew of the Queen. Having divorced one of the world’s richest men, the extravagant couture buyer oversees every aspect of her yacht, which she charters out for 197,000 euros a week.

She calls her acquisition of the boat “a love story about a woman who was deprived of freedom since she was five, a love story about a woman who found love and freedom. It’s not a man who gave me this. It’s Phocea. ” She spotted Phocea in the Bay of Volpe, off Sardinia, in 1992 and fell in love with it. Back then she was ensconced on Lady Moura, now the seventh-largest yacht in the world, the 344-foot possession of Saudi Arabian Dr. Nasser al-Rashid, which, when it was launched in 1991 at an estimated cost of $100 million, was the most expensive yacht ever built. Ayoub had designed the interiors, “the whole boat, every inch,” and its name was an acronym of her name and Rashid’s. The couple divorced in 1996.

World-class clotheshorse Mouna Ayoub on Phocea , which she bought in a dilapidated state for $5.35 million and restored at a cost of $30 million.

In her memoir, La Vérité, she wrote that her life as the wife of a Middle Eastern magnate was a prison from which she could escape only in an abaya and veils, but tonight she refuses to discuss her ex-husband or his boat. She recalls the morning in 1992 when she left Lady Moura on a tender for a jog along the Bay of Volpe and first saw Phocea. She swam up to it and asked for a tour. Her request was denied because the owner, entrepreneur Bernard Tapie, who owns the Olympic Marseille football club, was asleep.

Back on Lady Moura, Ayoub stood on the A Deck and gazed at Phocea. “I knew that with those sails I could go anywhere, even without an engine,” she says. She made a vow: “One day she’s going to be mine, and nobody is going to prevent me from coming on board.” Even before her divorce, she went after Phocea, and after its owner was convicted of bribery, the yacht ended up, she has written, “sad and neglected, in Port Vauban, where she lingered for months begging for love and care. I decided that I should be the one to save her.” Though the chief engineer of Lady Moura told her Phocea was a wreck, Ayoub bought it at auction for $5.35 million and launched a $30 million restoration.

Yachtsmen speak about porn boats, yachts with all-female crews, and yachts with stripper poles and endless lines of “trolley dollies,” those loose young women forever eager to roll their suitcases down gangplanks. But the template for misbehavior at sea is docked in Monte Carlo’s Port of Font-vieille, the low-slung, two-masted schooner called Zaca, the infamous yacht of the late actor Errol Flynn, who, the six-member crew insists, still haunts the boat on which he slowly went insane, despite an actual exorcism by the Anglican Archdeacon of Monaco in 1978.

“We feel him here; things happen that we just can’t explain,” says the captain, Bruno dal Paz, leading me into *Zaca’*s saloon, which has been restored by an Italian businessman and hung with a 1943 Picasso. Captain Bruno opens a thick scrapbook of yellowed press clippings. In 1946, Flynn, after beating the charge that he had committed statutory rape on his first yacht, Sirocco, fled Hollywood. “Instead of killing myself I bought a new boat,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways. Perhaps Zaca, Samoan for “peace,” was cursed from the start; at its 1930 christening, the champagne bottle failed to break on its bow, always a bad omen. On one of Flynn’s first voyages, Zaca sank. On another, his crew mutinied. On what was supposed to be a “make-up” cruise, Orson Welles split from his wife, Rita Hayworth. After two wives left Flynn, the swashbuckler fell into a delirium of booze and drugs on the boat—a descent that included orgies, drug smuggling, a trip to Mexico to help a friend who was a Nazi evade an arrest warrant, and a second rape charge, by a woman barely of legal age. At 50, Flynn was “drinking vodka for breakfast and keeping a condom full of cocaine in his swim trunks,” according to a clipping in *Zaca’*s scrapbook. “I’ve squandered seven million dollars. I’m going to have to sell Zaca, ” Flynn lamented in an interview just before flying to Vancouver with his 17-year-old girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, to sell it for $150,000. The sale never took place, however, because Flynn had a heart attack, or committed suicide, just before signing the papers.

There are approximately 30,000 people working on yachts. Moving from one giant vessel to another, I was amazed at how young, attractive, well educated, and multi-lingual the crews all were. I soon discovered that, for every crew member employed, there are hundreds waiting to join a career that comes with unlimited perks (I watched the crew of Skat eating rack of lamb and drinking Taittinger for dinner) and excellent pay (a captain’s annual salary is $1,000 per yacht foot, and crews are usually paid in cash, says Dallas-based international financial consultant George Kline, who invests many a captain’s and crew member’s earnings). Even off duty, they refuse to mention specific owners or yachts, because they generally sign confidentiality agreements with their employers.

“On a boat I’m not going to mention, we had a group of Americans out for the Cannes Film Festival,” says Sebastian Frazer, a steward. “One night they went into the Jacuzzi with five women, but then the men went to bed, leaving the women, who began a full-on porn show. By then we’d lifted anchor from the Bay of Cannes, and they were going at it, completely oblivious that there were boats on both sides. The funny thing was that the Jacuzzi wouldn’t get hot enough, so we were boiling water and running up three levels with kettles to warm it, while also serving them Dom Pérignon. Even though the women hadn’t chartered the yacht, any guest that comes on board you still treat as a paying guest.”

In the mid-90s, a yacht owner placed one of the first ads to offer charters in a Moscow newspaper, and newly rich Russians swarmed to pony up $250,000 for a week on the boat. “ Whiskey beer! ” was all the first Russian on board said, at eight in the morning. “I took a step back, and he repeated it three times. Bring whiskey beer!’” remembers a steward named Gabriel, who arranged multiple brands of whiskey and beer on a silver tray, which he presented to the guest, who immediately began slugging down a succession of boilermakers. Soon a party was raging. “Six guys, 15 prostitutes—behavior that would send shivers down your spine,” says the steward. “Every horizontal surface on the boat gets some action. When the crew’s around, they generally give us a wink ... and keep going.”

Americans currently lead the world both in buying and chartering yachts, but soon the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich may surpass all others. The 37-year-old father of five, who started life as an orphan and whose wife is a former Aeroflot stewardess, chartered his first yacht in 1998, according to Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere, by Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins. He then quickly began snapping up super-yachts as capriciously as he’d bought oil rights in Russia and the Chel-sea Football Club. First he paid an estimated $25 million for Sussurro, a 161-foot gas-turbine Feadship, a product of the famed Dutch shipyard. Next he paid between $80 and $100 million for the 370-foot Le Grand Bleu, previously owned by cellular-telephone king John McCaw. The largest American-owned private boat when it was launched in 2000 and now No. 6 in the world, it’s complete with an Austin Powers—style bottom-level viewing port, around which guests sit to watch the sea life, which Abramovich summons by shooting out food via remote control. After that he bought the 377-foot Pelorus, the world’s fifth-largest, from Saudi billionaire Al Sheik Modhassan. Then, last summer, he took possession of his new, 282-foot, $100 million Feadship, which he christened Ecstasea, and went with his full fleet of four yachts to Portugal. “He always comes on with his family. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke, they eat healthy, they work out,” says a source who has been on the boats. Another source adds, “He likes to have breakfast on one yacht, lunch on another, dinner on the third, and, of course, he’s got a different set of chefs on each yacht.”

P. Diddy Combs is another celebrity who has thrust himself into yacht culture. In the summer of 2002, after yacht-hopping for years on St. Barth’s, he decided to charter a boat. He settled upon the 170-foot Samax, whose former owner had named the boat Tits and the tenders Nipple I and Nipple II . P. Diddy took Samax to his favorite spot on the French Riviera, Saint-Tropez. “He spent $25,000 on clothes,” remembers Fonzworth Bentley, Combs’s former assistant.

Immediately, tabloid headlines blazed with allegations of all manner of misadventures and mayhem at sea. The reality, says Bentley, consists mostly of cannonball competitions off the top deck, endless games of spades, round-the-clock apple pie à la mode, and constant surveillance by local authorities. “Two years ago, Puff got a speeding ticket on the WaveRunner off of Saint-Tropez,” says Bentley. “The thing is, Puff didn’t actually do it. Someone else from the group got the ticket. But he was on Puff’s boat and he was black, so it was just Puff. The reality is we’re still black. I don’t care if you’ve got a yacht and you’re in Saint-Tropez. The police is watching.”

Still, Bentley admits, life on a Diddy-chartered boat is a 24-hour party.

“This man was on Broadway!” he exclaims, referring to P. Diddy’s run in the 2004 revival of A Raisin in the Sun. “If I was on Broadway as long as he was, on the last day either I would have ran through Times Square butt-naked screaming or got a phat yacht and went crazy overseas. So he chose the latter.”

But, he adds, the super-yacht world is equally insane. “You hear about how black people like to flaunt their wealth? But the level of flaunting of the wealth on a yacht is far more ridiculous.” Bentley and P. Diddy call it flossing. Bentley explains: “You staying on a yacht? O.K., how big is your yacht? It’s not only the size of the yacht, it’s also the width. Then it’s: How good is your dock space? Then it’s: How many times does your crew change from daytime to evening? Then it goes to: What kind of wood is your dinner table made out of? Ours is padauk wood from India . . . ”

‘You see the planes? I organized!” says Formula One racing king Flavio Briatore on his spectacular yacht in the Bay of Volpe as a squadron of jets does crazy loops overhead. The air show is impressive (it was actually organized by the state), but the show is just as good on Briatore’s new yacht, the Lady in Blue, with its stunning Alberto Pinto interiors, Fernando Botero paintings, César sculptures, and a lunch table crowded with beauties in bikinis. Last night, at the opening of his Billionaire Club in Porto Cervo, where the jewelry shops stay open past midnight, Flavio was surrounded by gorgeous young women. The paparazzi screamed, “Flavio! Flavio!,” and his club’s video screens flashed endless photos of him: Flavio holding up the trophy he and his Renault Formula One team had won at last year’s Monaco Grand Prix; Flavio with his harem of famous women, which has included Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, and the mother of his baby daughter, Heidi Klum; Flavio in close-up, climbing out of a swimming pool.

“Why do women love yachts?,” I ask Flavio, who is sitting in the saloon wearing a sarong. Before he can answer, Naomi Campbell, who’s staying on the Lady in Blue, explains. “I can’t imagine a woman who would say, ‘I don’t love a boat, I don’t love a private plane.’ I mean, when I met Flavio, I didn’t know what he did, who he was. But I think the yacht’s part of his whole mystique, his appeal. It’s a whole package.”

Once lovers, they are now friends. After their first date, a dinner in Athens, where Naomi was on a modeling assignment, Flavio flew her to the shipyard in Genoa and showed her his yacht, the first Lady in Blue, which was being refitted. When the work was completed, he gave Naomi the ultimate gift: his yacht on her birthday. Last year marked the fifth such birthday party, off Saint-Tropez, with a performance by Cirque du Soleil, fireworks, and 400 guests, including U2’s Bono. “That’s the old Lady in Blue, ” says Flavio, motioning out into the bay, which is littered with super-yachts, from New Sunrise, the mammoth vessel of the Israeli businessman Sami Ofer, to Kisses, the fabulous Art Deco—filled Feadship of former Philadelphia Eagles owners Norman and Irma Braman. The original Lady is now called Sirahmy and is owned by the head of Telecom-Italia.

“It was very sexy,” Flavio says of his former yacht. But the new one, three years in development, is even sexier—“the top boat, technically, at this moment,” he says proudly.

(A scant three months after taking delivery, Flavio sold his new Lady in Blue to Miami developer Jeffrey Soffer. “The yacht wasn’t for sale, but Flavio said, Everything’s available at the right price,’” says Soffer’s father and business partner, Don Soffer. The boat was sold fully furnished, but Flavio insisted on keeping several major pieces of art, as well as his captain, Luigi del Tevere, who had previously captained the yachts of Adnan Khashoggi, the Sultan of Brunei, the Swarovski-crystal family, and Mohamed Al Fayed. “Mr. Briatore already has a bigger boat, which he is calling Force Blue, ” says Captain del Tevere.)

‘For me, everything comes from the sea, and a boat is a kind of laboratory, a quarry,” the architect Renzo Piano says on his yacht, Kirribilli. Based in his hometown of Genoa, the birthplace of Columbus, Piano has spent his career transferring his yacht designs to his architectural projects. The ferro-cement he developed for his yacht is now on the roof of the Menil Collection art museum he designed in Houston. The idea of a “ship like Jules Verne would design in the middle of the sea” established the overall theme of Paris’s Pompidou Center, which he co-designed. The carbon-fiber antennae on Kirribilli will soon appear in a gigantic steel replica atop the new New York Times Building on Eighth Avenue.

Just as Piano applies his yacht designs to his architectural projects, some of the world’s most famous designers transfer their fashion showmanship to oceangoing vessels. Diego Della Valle, the Milan-based fashion magnate and owner of Tod’s, sitting in his all-mahogany Marlin, formerly John F. Kennedy’s motor yacht, whose auction Della Valle heard about through a Christie’s newspaper ad, says, “I went to see it, and after 10 minutes I made my offer. That same day, Ralph Lauren invited me to lunch at his house. His phone rang, and Ralph answered and passed the phone to me, saying, ‘Diego, you have bought a boat!’ After renovation, the Marlin began to cruise the Mediterranean, still holding the American presidential flag.”

Clothing designer Roberto Cavalli is another boat-lover. Of his new, 132-foot yacht, RC Roberto Cavalli Freedom, he says, “So special! So unusual! So Cavalli!” The motor yacht’s iridescent exterior changes colors, from papal purple to emerald green, “taking the reflection from the water down and the sun up,” Cavalli explains. There are leather-covered floors, python armchairs, lacquered goatskin walls, a profusion of animal horn, and Cavalli’s signature leopard-print and purple bedspreads with white mink throws. “The most important thing about the yacht is the color, like my clothes, and to be special, like my clothes!” he says, then whispers conspiratorially, “And it’s a little bit sexy, too, like my clothes.”

“My mother was a very elegant woman, and I think my boat has that same sort of elegance,” says Giorgio Armani, sitting on his super-yacht, Mariu, named for a song his mother sang to him as a child. The boat’s hull is the silver of Armani’s hair, and its interior is an homage to Armani’s world, from the 16-member all-male crew decked out in Emporio Armani to stem-to-stern Armani Casa furnishings.

Probably the most ferocious design force to hit the yacht world is Philippe Starck. We are sailing on Virtuelle, the silver sailing yacht Starck designed for Carlo Perrone, the Genoa-based businessman and great-grandson of the 19th-century arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles, whose Paris mansion now houses the Baccarat Gallery-Museum. “One day I was in my office in Paris, and a very elegant woman arrived, who said, Can you design me a yacht of something like 80 meters [250 feet]?,’” Starck remembers. He didn’t know the woman, but he knew he would never design a mega-yacht. He had followed the escalating gran-diosity of these vessels with outrage, even lambasted the refrigerator-white gin palaces so vehemently in speeches at yacht-society meetings that people left the room. “I’m sorry,” he told the woman. “I love boats. I have seven boats of my own. But I shall not design for you a big powerboat.”

Owner Carlo Perrone, the Genoa-based businessman, and French designer Philippe Starck aboard Virtuelle , the silver sailing yacht.

She asked why, and he let rip. “Vulgarity!” he said. “All of these big boats are just purely vulgar! People build and buy these boats to show the money they have, the power they have! For me, it’s social pollution! For me these boats are . . . gold shit!”

Starck had unleashed his fury on Hala Fares, wife of the Lebanese deputy prime minister Issam Fares and one of the world’s most stylish women, famous for her taste, evident in her clothes and the interiors of her homes and the family’s 727 jet.

“She did not speak for one minute,” says Starck. “Finally she said, ‘If I challenged you to make a yacht elegant, what would you do?’ So I was trapped!”

For five years, Fares, Starck, and Feadship collaborated on the Wedge Too. As with all of her design projects, Fares built the yacht without any hindrance from her husband, who would not even see it until it was completed, during the 2002 Christmas holidays in Monaco. “We invited our president and First Lady for Christmas, and oh, my God, my heart was beating,” Fares remembers. But the moment her husband saw the yacht’s two-level superstructure of oiled teak panels and stepped onto the 7,530 square feet of hardwood flooring, covered with Starck’s outrageous yet handsome furnishings and interior design, he smiled. “This is great!” he said, and the 20-member crew broke out the champagne. The next year Wedge Too won the ShowBoats International award for the most innovative motor yacht.

Although he still despises conventional super-yachts, Starck has nonetheless joined the yacht race. He’s now designing “the most advanced, the most modern boat in the world,” a 300-plus-foot mega-vessel whose plans look like Titanic meets 2001: A Space Odyssey. The client? “A young Russian genius of mathematics, a Russian Bill Gates,” says Starck. “[Aesthetically] we are deeply in love.”

‘We had Gregory Peck, Frank and Barbara Sinatra, Michael Caine, Harry Belafonte, Sean Connery, Julio Iglesias, Roger Moore, Hubert Givenchy, Alan King, Anna Magnani, Adnan Khashoggi, Gina Lollobrigida, Rex Harrison, Don Hewitt and his wife, Marilyn, who were married on the boat—on and on and on,” says Simone Levitt. From 1972 to 1982, there was no more coveted invitation than a lavish, all-expenses-paid, two-week vacation on La Belle Simone, the 250-foot “floating Taj Mahal” of William J. Levitt, the developer of the post–World War II housing projects called Levittowns, and his beautiful French wife, Simone. “It was a fairy tale,” says Simone Levitt of her life on a yacht so big that it ignited a feud between her husband and Revlon founder Charles Revson, whose Ultima II was 15 feet shorter, and so grand that it was used as the *Christina—*instead of the actual *Christina—*in the 1976 movie about Onassis called The Greek Tycoon.

Then, just like that, the yacht was gone, sold to Saudi Arabia’s former OPEC minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, along with every last penny and possession. Before Bill Levitt died, in 1994, at the Levitt Pavilion of New York University’s North Shore University Hospital, which he’d underwritten, he repeated something he’d long before told his wife: “A yacht is a furnace that just burns money.”

Things got so tough that Simone Levitt was reduced to serving as a hostess on a cruise ship. Today super-yacht life for her is reduced to framed photographs on her bathroom wall. “We were good schnooks, my husband and I,” she says. “Oh, my God, they drank our champagne and ate our caviar. He played the piano and I sang. When I had the boat, everybody is kissing your you-know-what. But after my husband died, people aren’t rushing to invite me.”

She continues: “Do you realize what I would give now to have the money that we spent on the champagne, the caviar, the trips, the crew, the oil, the gasoline? It cost a million a year. My God, I could live like a queen today. We just gave and gave, and sometimes, when we went onshore, they had the audacity not to pay for dinner. Once in a blue moon, yes, but most of the time my husband put his hand in his pocket.”

She insists that she’s not bitter. “I had a woman approach me at a party and say, ‘Oh, my dear, it must be terrible to have been all the way on top and fall all the way down.’ I said, ‘If someone told you that for 10 years you could have anything in the world—a yacht, a Rolls-Royce, sables, minks, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires—but at the end of the 10 years you would have to give it back, would you not do it?’ She said she’d rather not have it at all. But now my memories are my wealth, and no one can take them away from me.” She adds, “Everything ends, nothing is forever. A yacht is a fantasy, and whoever believes it’s going to be there forever is going to be hurt.”

Tonight I’m dressed as a Renaissance fop in one of the costumes flown in from London for a bash on the 180-foot super-yacht Amnesia, on which I’ve sailed from Naples to Capri to Sardinia. Across the rose-petal-strewn dinner table sit my host, Daniel Snyder, the 40-year-old owner of the Washington Redskins, who has chartered the boat for two weeks, and his wife, Tanya, dressed as Romeo and Juliet. Next to them, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his wife, Gene, are costumed as Sir Lancelot and Guinevere, and nearby are original CNN anchorman Bernie Shaw and his wife, Linda, dressed as Henry VIII and one of his wives. In a few hours former superagent Michael Ovitz and his wife, Judy, whose yacht, Illusion, is moored nearby, will join the party. Docked between Ultima III, owned by Revlon’s Ronald Perelman, and Te Manu, owned by Mel Simon, co-owner of the Indiana Pacers, we’re having a feast. Our crew, whom we’ve come to love like family, are also in Renaissance apparel, and the chef has cooked a suckling pig.

I’m so up, enjoying all this opulence, that I halfway believe I belong, until a stewardess, dressed as a serving wench, whispers in my ear, “And what time will you be departing in the morning, sir?” When I return to my stateroom, my old suitcase has been placed beside the bed.

The next morning a new group of guests arrive, and I hear the crew laughing at their jokes, as they recently did at mine, and pouring them champagne. As a crew member holds out his hand to help me onto the tender that will deposit me back on dry land, I hesitate, longing to hang on to Amnesia like a suckfish on a whale, but for me the party’s over. On 6,000 super-yachts around the world, however, the party never ends.

The Most Fabulous Yachts at Sea

Special Correspondent

By Kevin Kwan

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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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By Emily Witt

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

By Sarah Stillman

By David Owen

Rising rent? Mega mortgage? Cozzielivs? 'Hardship' help hard to get, as banks fail to help those who need it

Lenders are making it difficult to get help and more than one-third of people seeking assistance drop out of the process. 

A new ASIC report says banks aren't doing what the law says they must do to help customers in trouble, as the number of borrowers in strife rises due to high interest rates, rocketing rents and increases in the cost of living.

"We found that in a number of respects, banks and other lenders are failing to live up to community expectations," said Australian Securities and Investments Commissioner Alan Kirkland.

"They've got processes that are so complicated and convoluted that more than a third of people have dropped out of the process at least once after lodging a notice of hardship."

40 per cent fail

So-called 'hardship provisions' and processes set out what lenders must do if customers are in financial difficulty.

The vast majority of customers who request hardship assistance get it.

But the ASIC report found 40 per cent of customers who got assistance — through things like the reduction or deferral of payments — fell into arrears right after the assistance period ended.

The regulator's chair Joe Longo has tipped legal action against some of Australia's biggest names in finance over the failures.

"ASIC has made this a priority focus area, and where appropriate, we will not hesitate to take enforcement action to protect consumers," he said.

The report lays out how hard many lenders can make it for customers seeking help:

• Customers often need to repeat their stories multiple times to different people
• Some lenders have "onerous requests for documents" that aren't relevant to the lending
• Many lenders didn't follow up, meaning some applications were denied because customers didn't know the bank was waiting for information from them

Report shows 54 per cent jump in home loan hardship

In addition to outlining the failures for many customers accessing the hardship process, the ASIC report highlighted a massive jump in mortgage stress.

ASIC surveyed 10 lenders in detail and a further 10 large lenders in relation to their mortgage hardship figures, finding more than a quarter of a million hardship notices were issued in relation to 144,000 accounts.

The regulator noted a 54 per cent jump in hardship notices received in the final three months of 2023 (52,826) compared with the same period a year earlier (34,396).

Last year saw the peak of pandemic-era cheap fixed mortgages rolling over onto much higher variable interest rates, with many borrowers up for a rate more than three times higher than when they took their loan out.

A large number of cheap fixed loans are still rolling off onto variable rates this year.

More than 80 per cent of the home loan hardship notices related to owner-occupiers, while the average loan size for those requesting hardship provisions was $312,000.

The most common reason for requesting hardship assistance was "overcommitment", which raises questions about whether banks lent responsibly during the low-rate period, with reduced income, medical, unemployment and relationship separation the other main reasons for mortgage difficulty.

New South Wales had the largest number of borrowers in difficulty but, relative to population size, more Victorians were in mortgage hardship.

Community expectations

In a statement with the release of the report, titled 'Hardship, hard to get help: Lenders fall short in financial hardship support', ASIC chair Joe Longo said "in the worst cases, lenders ignored hardship notices, effectively abandoning customers who needed their support" and that lenders were not meeting community expectations.

The repeated use of the phrase 'community expectations' will chill the hearts of banking executives .

That's because it was used extensively during the banking royal commission to describe unacceptable conduct where firms technically or minimally complied with the law.

They didn't do anything illegal, but it wasn't fair conduct and didn't lead to good customer outcomes.

In some cases this led to laws being changed so that the intent — or 'spirit' — behind them became cemented in practice.

What is hardship?

If you're in trouble, your lender must try to help you. That's the law. This new report outlines how that system is failing.

Under the National Credit Code, if a consumer tells their lender they can't or won't be able to meet their payments, lenders must consider varying the credit contract and then advise the customer of the decision within a specified period of time.

These variations could include payment deferrals, reduced payments or interest-only payments for a time, an extension to the term of the loan, interest-rate reductions and more.

In August 2023, the regulator published an open letter to the chief executives of all lenders advising them of focus on financial hardship and what is expected of lenders.  After collecting data from 30 large lenders it reviewed 10 of them — a mixture of big banks (Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB) and smaller lenders (Pepper Money, Liberty Financial and Bendigo Bank).

The report notes how the hardship process is a critical protection for customers, but also good for banks.

"It provides the customer with an opportunity to work constructively with their lender to resolve their financial hardship, potentially avoiding the need to sell their home," it said.

Forced sales are difficult, with costs including sales and relocation as well as non-financial costs like stress and disruption.

It can be good for banks too, because it "provides lenders with an opportunity to restore the loan’s performance" and can avoid the costs of debt collection and enforcement.

And the demand for help is growing.

Comparing the fourth quarter of 2022 and the same period in 2023, there was a 54 per cent increase in the number of hardship notices relating to home loans.

Stress increase

The managing director of not-for-profit Mortgage Stress Victoria, Nadia Harrison, often helps people in the middle of trying to get assistance from their lender.

"There are individuals and even teams within some banks who will listen, be flexible and deliver great outcomes for customers experiencing hardship," she said.

"But there's huge variability between the banks, and even within the same bank."

In addition, Ms Harrison said what's on offer doesn't take into account the reality of how long assistance will be needed.

A third of the Mortgage Stress Victoria's clients are victim survivors of family violence.

"But at the moment, we’re finding it hard to get more than a three-month repayment pause for those clients – and even then, interest will be accumulating," she said.

Often women in these situations are working through issues of property settlement, custody, trauma, disruptions to work and intervention orders.

"Three months is never enough time to regain control of your life and your mortgage repayments when family violence is involved."

Bankers respond

The report does not take institutions to task over individual results, so it isn't clear out of the 10 examined who is better or worse.

It does note larger lenders are better-resourced and have more established processes to deal with customers in difficulty.

Australian Banking Association chair Anna Bligh said banks used a range of tools to help out customers, including restructuring loans to lower repayments, moving to interest-only arrangements or deferring payments for a period of time.

"Banks have longstanding arrangements in place to support people facing financial difficulty, including highly experienced and dedicated hardship teams ready to help customers," she said in a statement.

"In any organisation, there is always room for improvement. Banks will consider these findings and work with ASIC on any further ways to support customers. 

"Customers who are feeling the pinch financially should take heart from the fact that the report finds that 94 per cent of all completed applications for assistance are approved."

The Australian Finance Industry Association, which represents non-bank lenders, were approached to comment on the report.  

The full report is available on ASIC's website .

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