Jeff Bezos' 127M sailing yacht has completed construction | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Bezos' 127M sailing yacht has completed construction

boatinternational.com

It's 127m as in meters, not 127M as in millions. I think the actual price was more around 300M.

Millions is usually abbreviated to MM for this reason.

No, MM is an abject abuse of Roman numerals (which means 2,000), as near as I can tell thanks to a nomenclature distortion originally involving CPM (cost per thousand impressions). I can't get over how messed up MM=million is.

"mm" is frequently used in finance and probably predates the existence of CPM

So millimeters, then? :)

"M" is used quite frequently for million along with "K" for thousand. "MM" as million is used in conjunction with "M" for thousand, but that's a different notation set. "M" & "K" usage is generally much more popular than "MM" and "M", at least in any areas I've been.

> So millimeters, then? :)

The difference between mm and MM is rather easy to spot.

Thanks. I was confused on such a coincidence like 127mt costs 127 million and named Y721.

It’s confusing. Cruise ships are way bigger and don’t cost that much more.

Cruise ships cost like 500 million though.

I imagine there are many economies of scale in a cruise ship that you wouldn’t see here. Cabins that are all pretty much the same, with the same fittings and fixtures. Cruise ships are also highly derivative of previous cruise ship designs. This one is probably completely bespoke, and kitted out with gold-plated everything.

Also, take Harmony of the Seas as an example. It’s about 3x longer (362m) and cost about 3x as much ($1.35bn). One could argue cost scales with volume more than length, but on the other hand, maybe this is telling us that it doesn’t.

Yes same thing. A 50 passenger Charter bus is way bigger then Ferrari and in-fact usually cost less than a Ferrari

A bus is around $500,000, a Ferrari will be cheaper unless you are going for some limited production or collectible model.

> a Ferrari will be cheaper unless you are going for some limited production or collectible model.

You can get used busses for far less thab $500,000, and, if you are comparing new, well, its practically impossible to get a new Ferrarri, and the cost isn’t justthe nominal purchase price, its jumping through the hoops Ferrarri erects.

(Yes, that’s worse for “limited production” models where they want you to own four Ferrarris to get on the list on top of everything else, but its true more generally, and Ferrarris total production would barely be a single limited production model for most automakers.)

You can get a used Ferrari for quite a low price too… it’s not particularly hard to get a new Ferrari either they make about 10,000 cars per year and their serial production cars don’t have that long of a waiting list since the majority of people who can afford one do not want a serially produced car or already own one.

A Ferrari isn’t just an expensive car it’s a rather useless car so even the crowed who wants and can afford luxury like a 150-200K pimped out S- Class / Porsche / Land Rover / Jeep Grand Whatever Indian Tribe they are on now which they can still use as an every day/family car is not in the market for one.

So believe it or not there isn’t a huge demand for Ferraris out there most people who can afford one already have one and they tend to go for highly sought off models and configurations rather than the normal production ones.

As long as you live near a Ferrari dealership you probably can get one of their serially produced cars within a 4-8 weeks.

Looking at the UK at least I can get a new Ferrari now pretty much instantly on the other hand a Porsche Taycan has a delivery time frame of nearly a year and a Merc EQS SUV has a waiting list of 70 weeks.

So now Bezos has the longest one.

I believe it’s considered not the done thing to sleep in your super yacht in port - you’re expected to decamp to the nearest 5* hotel.

Genuinely can’t understand the point of them to be honest, they seem to be nothing but wealth signalling to peers I’d hope (as a middle-class person) would have a lot more sense and a lot less social insecurity.

I would assume they provide some form of additional insurance should some mass event like war, nuclear fallout, international embezzlement, or covid transpire.

You'd need to find a coterie of machine gun armed thugs to join you if it got to that point.

Doesn't Peter Thiel already have private security at his luxury nuclear fallout shelter, with agreements that their immediate families get to join them in the bunker if/when the apocalypse happens?

In such an event, I'm sure there would be plenty of those available for hire.

Of course, then you're stuck on a gigantic boat with a bunch of armed thugs...

If there is such a disaster (to you or the world) that a yatch could be of use for shelter, you are no longer a billionaire and people on the yatch will throw you to the shark, figuratively and potentially literally.

I think you're assuming this is the end of the world. Much more likely to be a regional issue like war, litigation, fraud or outbreak has historically been.

Literally one of the first things seized from Russian oligarchs though once they went to war with Ukraine.

They're only as safe as where they're parked.

Those yachts aren't self-sufficient and they cost an incredible amount to keep running on a daily basis.

I appreciate LazerPig's take on the subject (The whole video is a fun watch, but this is the yacht specific part): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRDPd0MiopM&t=375s

Essentially it's keeping up with the joneses. Turns out rich people are, on average, more lucky than they are original or skilled. They're generally subject to the same personality flaws as any person making 40k/year or less, but whereas the person making 40k/year has financial constraints on how much they can indulge their character flaws, the deca-millionaire or greater does not. Money is an accelerant, and if you're already deeply insecure (as most obsessive workaholics that become billionaires are) money will only make you more so.

Bezos was also incredibly successful in another domain before starting Amazon - he was the youngest senior VP at DE Shaw. So maybe it wasn't just luck.

When you're talking "self made billionaire" I think you're picking from a select enough group that "very lucky a few times" is still within reason.

Plenty of hard-working Senior VPs at hedge funds never become billionaires. Hedge funds themselves tend to rely on a good deal of luck plus skilled marketing. If Bezos had been working at DE Shaw during an economic downturn, would he have had the same future?

Was it "just" luck? Of course not. But I'd argue luck is the primary difference between being in the top 1% vs being in the top 0.001%

Indeed. I'd guess extreme hard work is a given for at least thousand times more people than number of billionaires in the world. So great luck or series of great lucks is one thing that would set billionaires apart.

The $245,000 loan from his parents in 1995 to help start Amazon begs to differ.

I don't think DE Shaw VP would need a 250K loan from his working class parents.

That was a first round of funding, the same terms as other non-family members got. It wasn't a gift or anything like that, and it is why Jeff's parents are now billionaires.

Nobody said anything about it being "just luck". It's a combination of both luck and skill. It's like a pro golfer getting a hole in one. Obviously there skill contributed a lot, but the fact that they're still rare means a fair amount of luck is involved.

There could be 1,000 people just as talented as Bezos, but if they aren't in the right place at the right time they just simply aren't going to accumulate over 100 billion dollars

Everything is just luck. Genetics, upbringing, and environment all strongly influence skill and success. With different luck he could have been the youngest gang leader in the hood.

It's luck that you weren't born a lettuce I guess, but that is certainly an expansive view of luck.

Not the done thing according to who exactly? Bezos sets the trends, he doesn't need to follow them. It's not like he's a dime a dozen dude with just a billion or two.

Does he set the trends though? Trend setting elsewhere doesn't necessarily follow the richest person around.

You're not going to get much privacy on a European beach. Lounging on a yacht is how you avoid having to sunbath next to millionaires.

>they seem to be nothing but wealth signalling to peers

I recommend to watch the Silicon Valley satire TV show. It really has such scenes where tech billionaires do insanely wasteful purchases just because one of their tech billionaire peers already has done something similar, just to maintain their status and ego among the SV elite.

They also make fun of SV tech workers who feel they need to own a Tesla with Ludicrous Mode and the exclusive rims to show success.

It's great satire, though it feels more like reality sometimes.

You seem to be treating fiction as if it was representative of the real world.

Yes, because everyone knows the show bears no resemblance to the real world.

The cynic in me observes that a boat allows you to get to international waters outside the reach any jurisdiction.

For what purpose?

Avoid the jurisdiction? Raise a Haitian flag and you are good to go.

Exchanging bags of cash? Seriously though, there was an idea floated few years ago about a cruise ship floating at the coast of silicon valley in international waters without paying taxes for companies. It didn't take off though.

legal reach

It would be interesting to see someone with the wealth of Bezos create a new nation, whether it's on land or at sea. It would also be interesting if he could team up with Thiel and put some serious money behind seasteading.

> […] a new nation, whether it's on land or at sea.

Cue William Gibson:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

My inner nitpicker can't resist mumbling something about:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson

Like most sailboats. I thought that was the allure?

But then again out at sea with 30 servants and having to wear clothes is not my idea of freedom

> they seem to be nothing but wealth signaling to peers

I'd like to see a study where they took the net worth of boat owners and compared to them to purchase price, I wonder what the % would trend to.

This yacht is around 1/3 of 1% of his wealth. It’s the analog of a 10-millionaire buying a new Honda Civic.

>I believe it’s considered not the done thing to sleep in your super yacht in port - you’re expected to decamp to the nearest 5* hotel.

Depends where. At popular yachting destinations like Sardinia or St Barth? No, you're expected to stay on board.

In cities like Barcelona with actual ports, it might not be particularly comfortable to stay on board given the environment.

People who sleep aboard ship do so because they love sailing. My father bought a 30' sailboat from a man who used to live on it, sailing from place to place until he bought a bigger boat to serve as home.

Sleeping ashore in a hotel conveys "oh, this old thing?" vibes about your yacht. You don't really care about ships or sailing, you just bought it on a whim, because you're rich enough to do that.

And yes, they are wealth signalling. I remember a white paper put out by Oracle about "Java isn't going anywhere". It included a photo of Larry Ellison's America's Cup yacht. To technical folks the yacht photo is ridiculous. But technical folks don't get to make large scale technical decisions, those are made by business people. And the yacht photo reinforces the central message to business types: Java is backed by a successful company with a billionaire CEO, so you can count on it for your business.

No hotel will be as luxurious as this yacht.

I admit it- this is a lovely yacht and what I wouldn't give to be at her helm for an hour sailing on the open sea. And the prospect for super-yacht races is too good to pass up! An extraordinary race across the Atlantic. Aboard each vessel, celebrity guests are entertained in splendor and it's all live streamed to the world.

Alternatively, I'd like to see a billionaire fist-fight on the moon.

Keep in mind that boats in general aren't built in sufficient quantities to enable mass-production on the scale of automobiles. And this is a custom yacht on top of that.

So, a stupendously high percentage of the purchase price went directly into the paychecks of the middle-class laborers that built it.

Let's be honest - this is going to spend 98% of its time sitting in a harbor, with a full-time middle-class maintenance team making sure it is ready for the other 2% of the time. Enjoy it Jeff.

Yes, at the end of the day the lucky laborers now hold a fresh piece of paper on their hands. While Mr. Bezos enjoys his real world tangible object, the laborers will discover that their work isn't done yet. Because their money is only worth if they themselves work for each other once again, otherwise it is just worthless paper.

Though somehow I still find it unsatisfying that these laborors rely on a single person's decision to buy a luxury item for these wages.

I'm not anti-capitalism by any means, but despite the average person becoming better off, I find it deeply unsatisfying that we have very few mechanisms to control the insane broadening of the wealth gap.

I don't want to rely on Jeff trickling down his wealth through purchases of yachts and random donations to Van Jones. I want us to collectively agree that there must be some ceiling to wealth for individuals. Not putting a ceiling on wealth is effectively not putting a ceiling on power - and we've already realized that power needs to have checks and balances.

Yeah sure, I agree in principal. And I agree that power needs checks and balances. But all I see are proposals that move the power into the hands of a fickle mob which in the long run is way worse (see the French Revolution as an example).

And I don't have a Time Machine to go back and change the rules to prevent him from getting so rich in the first place. So here we are. He's got the cash. And it's great that he is spending at least a tiny amount of it on something that requires a continuous stream of spending or the asset becomes useless. Whether he uses it or not.

Yeah, I also want us to agree on a cap of life expectancy in Europe and North America. We have millions of poor kids dying of disease and malnutrition in Asia and Africa. Whereas millions of rich people in West are reaching up to 80-100 years of age, supported by high quality medicine and nutrition. If we agree to put ceiling on age at 75% of current it could save tremendous resources for young and poor people in this world.

I can only assume this is sarcasm.

But all of that labour could have gone into building actually productive assets or infrastructure that meet some of the many real needs that exist in the world. This is a terrible allocation of resources, barely better than him paying them to go into the desert and dig a giant hole and then fill it in again.

I don't the Jeff Bezos personally is the problem, but he and his peers are symptoms of an economic system with very messed up incentives.

That’s about 1/1000 of his net worth, and about 1000x the median American net worth.

So to Jeff it’s like spending $127 on a boat.

I think a lot of us would do it too.

Edit: oh wait, 127m is the length and the cost is estimated at $500m. Well that changes everything, he’s a monster.

I misread the title also. It is 127Meters in length, no mention of the cost.

The boat is 127 meters long (sailboats are described primarily by length). Its cost has been reported (elsewhere) in the vicinity of US $500 million.

One wonders how much the maintenance will cost.

what does $500 million buy, that $450 million does not?

Faster wifi and fancy coasters for your drinks.

And a heated steering wheel.

Don't forget extra USB (Type C!) ports.

Plus staff while in use.

According to this article (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/the-haves-and-...) annual upkeep is typically about ten percent of the construction cost.

I like how analogous it is to space travel. You're captain of a ship, a small scale version of the Enterprise, and you can use it as a staging platform for travelling around the world. While I would prefer a smaller craft, where something like a Swan 78 would be sufficient for any of my own conceivable needs, if I had a 127m yacht, I would probably equip it with some lab space for use based on research proposals, anywhere from ocenographic studies to astronomy and VLF signals research.

Some acquaintences have spent time as a writer in residence or musician in residence in various places in the world where they spend time working on their next project, and I would probably use a craft like this to offer similar residencies, as I think offering extraordinary experiences to extraordinary people so that they can use them in their contributions to humanity is a very effective way to apply wealth. The thing is going to be empty most of the time anyway, and they're better when the owner isn't around the whole time where you feel like you have to entertain as well.

While I have not done a yacht delivery, they typically take a few weeks all-in, with different crew for each leg. Moving this 127m thing around all the time will create a lot of opportunities to join it for a few days to several weeks on delivery legs, so you'd be able to offer a few different residencies each year, and this thing has enough space where you could really get some frission with multiple residencies going on. Maybe I need a superyacht.

Are these superyachts built with defence capabilities? If I were a billionaire I'd be building these to suit my life in some potential Waterworld future.

I have heard that some are equipped with defenses like that but those were more for heads of state.

I'm sure that the rules are different for important people. But in general, no armed foreign boat is allowed in any port in the world unless it is a military vessel with an agreement already in place.

It's completely legal to summarily execute pirates in most of the world.

No, that would be too limiting. Instead they'll just meet their armed PMSC escorts in international waters.

In general, arming a boat is a huge nuisance if you are going to travel between countries. You might have a fantastic super yacht, but it’s like every country thinks they can make their own rules and tell you what you can and can’t do in their territory. Crazy.

This boat looks so much like the one owned by Barry Diller…probably doing a dick measuring contest with his close friend

https://pagesix.com/2021/07/07/jeff-bezos-spends-final-days-...

"dick measuring contest" is not typical fare for HN, but in this case it seems like the most appropriate description.

Here’s a fun related story on how they wanted to get it out to open sea: https://nltimes.nl/2022/06/30/historic-rotterdam-bridge-wont...

That was expensive. But at least he will save some on gas

I'm trying to understand how a sailing yacht has a pool on the aft deck. Do boats this size not heel much or is there some clever way to prevent all the water pouring out?

They have stabilisers to stop them rolling side to side

That prevents the rolling, but do they use those to prevent the constant heeling that sailing cross-wind causes?

I edited my comment since I guess "sloshing" was the wrong word for a constant incline.

Maybe it is drained to a holding tank down near the keel to add stability. And when at anchor, they pump it back into the pool.

I shouldn't mention this probably but I watch Below Deck on the Bravo channel which follows the crews of charter yachts. One of which is a sailboat with a hot tub. I think you are right, when it's sailing (which seems to be rather infrequently), the hot tub is drained somehow.

When sailing, you more or less choose your angle of heel (subject to trade offs of speed and heading). In any kind of respectable wind you do not “slosh”, the angle of heel affects the effective area of the sail to the wind and forms a sort of stabilizing feedback loop. You go up and down over the waves, and sometimes have a lateral oscillation across them, but rolling is minimal.

Now, once you anchor, if there are waves coming from a direction other than the bow (because they refract around whatever is sheltering you), and those waves are roughly the natural period of oscillation of your boat’s roll… then you get things flying out of cabinets and trying to sleep while clinging to your bunk. Scaling up to a mega yacht makes your roll period long enough that it isn’t so much of a problem.

All that said, I’m sure they have tanks for the pool water, since it is probably fresh water.

From the same website:

Iconic yachts: On board Steve Jobs's Feadship superyacht Venus

https://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/editorial-features/...

Jobs died before it was finished.

Very reminiscent of James Clark building the largest sail boat with automation with the money he made from Netscape. See "The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis from some fun and comical account of that boat.

What a waste of money. He'll probably use it 2-3 times a year and it'll sit somewhere unused the rest of the time. Also probably actually sails like a pig.

He s prepared for the next lockdown

So is this considered "green" because it is powered by sails? Or do the sails not really do much and it still needs massive engines to run?

It’s still going to have a lot of electrical systems, probably some diesel generators and a large diesel motor for propulsion.

Also it’s just a bunch of resources tied up with nobody using them most of the time. Doesn’t seem very “green” to me.

There are some people trying to do actually green stuff with sail power: https://www.sailcargo.inc/

yeah, but he moved $500 million from the billionare class to the "mostly working man" class (plus a few por millionares). Constructors, materials, supply chain etc etc. Plus jobs for some crew, port fees, mooring fees et al.

So, ya know, it's better than him just putting it under the mattress :)

We can only hope they don't wake from the illusion and spend this money right away by hiring each other and get occupied. God forbid they realize that money is actually their own time and effort, and this guy just tricked them into building something for him in exchange for the opportunity (money) of them working for themselves at another time.

As inequality grows, it only becomes more evident. Workers can safely cut the billionaire middle man.

Would the crew be permitted to use the bathroom or not though? /s

No. They have to use the head.

It's be really cool to get a detailed look inside.

Agree! I found it super interesting when inside photos of one of the seized Russian-owned super yachts came out [0]. This one had a whole hovercraft, a couple of Land Cruisers with appropriate landing vessels, etc.

[0] https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/nord-megayacht-interior...

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