A Cruise Ship Called “The World” Is a Luxury Home at Sea for the Super Rich

I actually expected it to be more expensive, at least up-front.

There are $2m condos near where I live, so consider something like a $45m lifetime cost (if you buy in at 60, stay until you're 90, and somehow never recover that sale price), and that's only a single order of magnitude difference. That's way less than I had expected for something in such short supply.

There are apartments in NYC that go for more than that a square foot, but even in the Carlyle they only pay 60-70% of that in maintenance per square foot.

> I wonder what advantages The World has over lines like Seabourn[0] or Silversea?[1]

Well, for a resident, you eliminate the cognitive load of changing residences. Your home on the ship is literally a home (albeit a heavily-regulated one, in the style of extreme HOAs), and you can treat it like one, rather than having to slice everything into several-week increments because you might have to leave or change cabins at short notice.

Of course, this comes with tremendous maintenance prices ($1m+ per residence per year), but for some people it's worth that.

A yacht with movie theater, gym, swimming pool etc costs about $25m. People who can spend that kind of money can also spend $1m or so on staff who will take care of you and the thing. When you have that kind of luxury vessel, it's also not hard to get famous artists and other intellectuals join onboard with you on vacation to exotic places (you are probably already friends with them). So ultimately its of little pragmatic value to have apartment on cruise ship vs having your own private yacht. But here's the thing, when your net worth is even just few billions dollars, you are likely making $100K or so every hour of your life. So why not have both?

Ann Rand, sea steading.. same ideas

Anyone know how feasible it would be to run this on solar power in the near future?

I think we should be fine with it if there's more than enough taxes on emissions.

And there should be luxury taxes too. The super-rich get this shit on discount (20% capital gains in the U.S.?), while most of us have to pay upwards of 40% extra for doing salaried work. It's not right.

In a couple of decades, it will likely be too late.

Given the average age of the residents, it's probably mostly things like "everything in the shipboard pharmacy is extremely cheap compared to the US".

Tax advantages from non-dom status, I'm guessing. And getting to be with the other ghetto kids.

But can you take said boat to Antarctica?

Does Shuji Nakamura give lectures on your boat?

Cognitive overhead. You have to deal with maintenance, logistics, staffing, planning, design etc yourself. Yes you get exactly what you want but it would likely be a bunch of work whereas this sounds fairly turnkey with everything planned out for you.

I could see that working with Bond. McClane is too much of an everyman to care about boatfull of billionaires in distress. Family would have to somehow end up on board.

Bond, on the other hand, is all about protecting the interests of (a subset of) the rich and powerful.

They’ve already made /Titanic/

Got to be careful - you'd want the terrorists to look like villains and for John McClane to be fighting for the right side.

Would it have killed them to use inverted commas?

Ha, I did. Thank you!

Tell that to the business that runs the ship.

Why?

however they want to spend their money. I just bought a 1969 Larry Csonka and 1968 Bob Griese. They serve no purpose, and there is a low but reasonable chance they are counterfeit.

surely less impactful than the collective trash heap generated by coastal technocrats replacing their phones every year

There would be a lot of jobs created in support an operation like this.

Outside of charity what else are these people going to do with their money? If they are already 60 there isn't much point investing it for the future unless it is about the next generation.

The less wasteful way would have been to have taxation laws that prevented them accumulating that level of wealth to begin with.