Jeff Bezos’s New Superyacht Heralds Roaring Market for Big Boats | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos’s New Superyacht Heralds Roaring Market for Big Boats

bloomberg.com

23 pointsElement_60 comments

Super yachts seem like a win-win. Parts billionaires with their money. Limits consumption of a finite asset (like land). Employees many highly skilled workers to build. Only big downside is how much fuel/energy they consume and possibly waste produced at sea (but I don't know much about that).

More power to they yachting industry!

Why couldn't those highly skilled workers do something more useful? Like build a fishing boat, research vessel, or hospital ship?

Because Amazon avoids taxes so there isn't money for those things.

Half the battle, I think. Taxes only do so much good when we spend them on things which are just as useless. New guns for the Navy aren't an improvement of a super yacht in my book.

That's a separate problem.

Because we don't live in a planned economy where people are assigned their profession based on usefulness as determined by some committee.

From a humanitarian perspective, when I think about how many unfortunate people half a billion dollars could help, I don't see a win anywhere in here. From an environmental standpoint, it's also a massively wasteful use of material resources for the exclusive and likely very infrequent benefit of a tiny handful of people. I think it's abhorrent.

This is a sailing yacht, so presumably it won't be using its engines that much (if it has engines, I know nothing about yachts).

Expensive sailing yachts like this operate under power most of the time. The sails are mostly for show and are typically used when the guests "feel like it".

Good to know. Out of curiosity, are the sails on this type of ship typically enough to power the ship on their own?

Clearly no and clearly yes: the sails won't provide auxiliary power, the electricity required to supply the navigation instruments (and lights, and the fridge, and sail automaton and in this case perhaps a Jacuzzi drawing more power than a village). But propulsion power, in favorable conditions, sure. And there's no lower bound for propulsion anyways: on a calm day with zero current you could run the boat on Jeff Bezos pulling it on a stand-up paddle board, infinitesimally slow.

It's interesting to think how the most flashy and repulsive wealthy people are often better for those around them than the simple, likable, wealthy people. The former spend their money, often all of it, and support people around them in the process, even if it wasn't their intention. The likable people often just hoard their wealth and spend very little. Note that this is a general observation--I have no comment on Bezos himself.

Don't most wealthy people invest their savings though?

So the money is getting used, unless they are just hiding it under their mattress or something.

Is it really helping anyone to pay people to do useless work? How is building a super yacht any different than paying people to dig a hole and fill it back in? All those people would be contributing more to society at any other job.

> The likable people often just hoard their wealth and spend very little.

Who? The billionaires I would consider likable are the ones who spend their money on significant charity efforts.

Normal people save for retirement and then retire. If you’re particularly fortunate, you can retire early.

It’s somewhat unusual for people to do something particularly notable in retirement. We don’t expect it, but sometimes it happens. It seems natural that people who do something interesting become more well-known than people who don’t?

Retirees do spend money and that does provide jobs. They also save money, which raises demand for investments. It’s also possible to give away money, and some do. I think that exhausts the alternatives?

Maybe the more interesting part is how you spend, invest, or give away money? There are boring and interesting ways to do it. The jobs created might be boring or interesting, well-paid or not.

They are like gold sinks in video games, but for real life!

>The pandemic put new value on so-called explorer yachts, some of which can cruise for 9,000 nautical miles without needing to refuel, said Aino Grapin, chief executive officer of superyacht-interiors studio Winch Design. “Clients can enjoy life at sea for long periods of time without having to go mix with others,” she said.

eh, not enjoying the phrase 'having to go mix with others'....

Well, there is a global pandemic going on right now. Normally that would seem kind of sleazy, but these days, that is what everyone is trying to do.

If you had to spend $500M, what would you spend it on?

Me:solid beautiful stone buildings that would last for centuries as community centers.

Pharaohs these days seem to have much tackier taste than they used to.

Their structures required more planning and delayed gratification.

To be fair, pyramids are pretty tacky. Imagine how much more hate Bezos would get for spending half a billion on a tomb!

I've noticed all my life, that governement and community buildings are very strange - all purpose-built. A courthouse; a post office. Laid out to be just that one thing.

What it means is over the years as communities grow, they get to be too small to manage the increased traffic. So another one gets built. Then another one. Each purpose-built again. My town has 3 old post offices. Two old libraries. Old newspaper offices. Old courthouse. Old jail.

And since they were purpose-built, the old building is not good for much. It gets used as a makeshift office space or gutted and split into badly lit low-rent apartments.

Why not build community buildings to be general-purpose? Why not just use a regular commercial building and lay out the offices and cubicles and storerooms like any other business would?

Just one of the odd human things, that's bothered me all my life.

Likely has to do with the fact that if you want to build a community centre that has the capacity to serve your community in 30 years, you also need the budget of that community 30 years in the future. You can only build what you can reasonably afford, and unfortunately that isn't a building that you can grow into.

Or, as suggested, just use an ordinary building that can be sold and repurposed when grown out of. Instead of the marble built-in counters and elaborate state offices etc.

But when you’ve got 100 billion you get to do a lot of things

https://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html

I assume construction is still ongoing? The updates page hasn't been updated in almost 10 years.

They've moved webpages.

https://longnow.org/clock/

The Getty Center in Los Angeles fits this bill pretty well. A stunning stone structure that is home to beautiful gardens and an art museum, open to the public with free admission (even the audio tour is free)

Construction cost was closer to $2 billion though

An endowment for history and translation. A 2003 gift of $200 million from philanthropist Ruth Lilly helped bolster the Poetry Foundation, which not only runs an an important poetry magazine but also funds a great number of poets and projects. I'd like to set one up for the study of regions where not enough funding has gone for historical research (including archaeology) and for translating poetry and literary works from a wider variety of languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry_Foundation

I don't mind the foundation, but poetry gotta be placed pretty high on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Millions of people don't even have access to clean water yet.

If I were to start a foundation I would likely focus on something fundamental like water instead of poetry.

Most of the potential improvements in that area are high-hanging fruit due to political issues in specific regions at this point, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of problems a big pile of money only makes worse.

Today ours are called Libraries. We need more of them.

Ah, but Amazon is in the book selling business..

When you have a ship with sails this big, you’ll need a huge crew right, each with their own rooms? And since it’s such a large _sailing_ yacht the number of people qualified to captain and crew it are probably very small, so you’re likely stuck onboard with one of the few people who can do that. Where I’m going is, if your idea for a yacht is luxury and privacy, why would you ever buy a sailing yacht? I’m failing to see the upside. You could make an eco argument, but this is completely unnecessary conspicuous consumption and the embodied carbon footprint of any mega-yatcht exceeds that of a typical lifetime.

> if your idea for a yacht is luxury and privacy, why would you ever buy a sailing yacht?

It isn't.

Ok, so what’s the appeal of a sailing yacht that someone else captains?

Status.

Billionaires are surrounded by servants, er... staff, all the time. Their sense of privacy is not like a normal person's.

So are the the wealthier middle class in the third world.

Normal people.

According to Wikipedia, the Eos, which the OP says inspired Bezos's yacht, carries a crew of 21 including 9 deck crew. It has room for 16 guests.

Good time to link "The wealth of jeff bezos in rice"[1], because the numbers are so mind bogglingly hard to get your head around.

His worth has gone from 120 billion to 190 billion in the 16 months since that video was made.

Meanwhile this is a 0.5 B boat. It's, like, not a small amount of rice. It's notable. But amid 190 B in wealth? It's so hard to keep the scale of these figures in mind. The rice helps.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W56g5KdqZoo

And people think billionaires don't waste resources :shrug:

3 years of what only Americans spend just on their pets could end world hunger semi-permanently

> In 2020, $103.6 billion was spent on our pets in the U.S. https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp

> It would cost just $330 billion to end global hunger by 2030 https://www.fastcompany.com/90564107/it-would-cost-just-330-...

the problem with this argument is you're pinning solving a major world problem on the masses. Why have Americans not spend 103 billion a year on their pets when Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos are much more equipped to do just that. Instead were trying to go the other direction and not let Amazon employees unionize.

Saying things like that makes you sound like when ExxonMobil Publishes papers on how if Americans ate 150 less grams of beef a year we could turn around global warming.

Pets consume more nutrients than Gates and Bezos combined. I'm quite sure that GP didn't mean it that way, but "the world" isn't a scale where you can simply ignore supply and extrapolate from current prices hoping that the result won't be far off.

Seeing waste on this scale makes me feel nauseous. The usable lifespan of a yacht of is only a couple of decades. This thing will be scrap before he's dead.

Unless we're very lucky.

Some folks spend their time changing the world and trying to get us off the planet to save humanity, some folks spend their time and money on yachts......

I wonder if any billionaires are going to buy and retrofit one of the dozens of mothballed cruise ships around the world.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33338/satellite-images...

How do you know when you have gone overboard? When your yacht has its own support yacht.

Look, I'm not going to take a boat to my yacht like some kind of peasant.

I would have though it was when some Russian billionaire's yacht supposedly had its own grenade launchers. Nominally it was to ward off pirates, but we all know it was really to stop James Bond.

I got to see the Hodor, a 216' support catamaran, in person. Honestly, I like it more than the boat it was supporting.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/billspringer/2019/06/21/billion...

https://archive.is/XOZIm

From the people who brought you:

Biden Tax Rule Would Rip Billions From Big Fortunes at Death

and

Richest 100 Americans Would Pay $78 Billion Under Warren Tax

I think that billionaires are bad for democracy, and that Bloomberg is not aligned with our interests as non-billionaires.

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-04/biden-tax-rule-would-rip-billions-from-biggest-fortunes-at-death

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-01/richest-100-americans-would-pay-78-billion-under-warren-tax

The real exposé here would be to know how Bezos paid for the Yacht.

Did he pay cash? Was it financed (unsecured, or secured by the boat itself)? Was it financed secured by Amazon stock? Was it purchased by a business? Was there any sort of sales tax/VAT?

When people recoil at a frivolous expense of this size they do so for two reasons. The first is that it seems "wasteful". To that, I say "whatever."

The second is this idea that Bezos is not paying his fair share, and that a 500MM frivolous purchase is a symbol of that.

And that question is one that can be answered. If Bezos paid for the yacht in cash, then in a way there was some capital gains tax associated with it. Same if there was VAT/sales tax. Sure, let him buy a 500MM yacht if it means $15MM in tax for whatever country levied it.

There is a real problem with unfair taxation in the US/world, and if the average person doesn't understand how the ultra, ultra, ultra rich actually spend their money, we're doomed to enact legislation that falls short of improving the taxation scheme.

> The real exposé here would be to know how Bezos paid for the Yacht.

I would love to know that.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-just-sold-nearl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com