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.
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.
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%
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
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.
Of course, then you're stuck on a gigantic boat with a bunch of armed thugs...
They're only as safe as where they're parked.
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.
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.
Cue William Gibson:
But then again out at sea with 30 servants and having to wear clothes is not my idea of freedom
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.
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.