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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> I don't care about costly trips. I mean, he has billions and works a lot. Spending a million here and million there is pretty frugal compared to some other people who need to prove their worth by upping each other on who has the largest yacht in the world.

> What I do care about, though, is hypocrisy.

Turns out, you should care about both. First of all, his private jet costs as much as a yacht, plus he doesn't own a yacht just because he rents them...

> While Musk famously owns a $70 million private jet, he hasn't sprung for a yacht of his own (unlike his space rival, Jeff Bezos). Instead, the group chartered a vessel — called Zeus which rents for over $7,000 a day.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-yacht-photos-greec...

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Is it just me or does $7,000/day actually sound very cheap? That's the nightly rate of, say, the nicest suite in a top-end hotel, but for a whole yacht. Maybe that doesn't include crew (besides the skipper, which the article says is included), fuel, food, etc.?

I think they have either the wrong boat or it wasnt a superyacht in the first place.

EUR 750k to 2mil per week is the sort of pricing I see for charter.

It's a 24 meters boat, for 20 people, which is really small compared to a billionaire yacht.

In comparison, Bezos' yacht is 127 meters long.

Renting yachts seems like a great mitigation to me. One yacht can service dozens of billionaires' 1-2 week vacations without sitting around in port useless 90% of the time.

If it flies, floats or f**ks - rent it.

You know what is the saying popular with skippers?

"If you buy your own boat you will only be happy twice in your life. On the day you buy it and then on the day you sell it."

He has a jet because, honestly, he is traveling constantly for his work. Call it a tax on running multiple large operations. Given his long work days I can see how the jet pays for itself many times over.

And renting a yacht for $7k is actually super cheap. I know people who spend more on champagne in a club in a single evening, and no, they are not billionaires.

Even if this yacht was rented 365 days a year, which I do not believe, this would be $2.5M / year.

Even if this absolutely worst case (I don't believe for a second that Elon is partying on the yacht for large part of the year) you could still rent it for literally hundreds of years and still not match the cost of just buying your own large yacht. Forget about insurance, maintenance and staffing costs.

If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.

Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.

> If you want to pass judgment on what is and what is not frugality when it comes to billionaires, you need to expand your views a bit and stop thinking like a poor person.

Also :-)))

We're not talking poor here. We're talking "makes more money in 1 month than the richest lawyer you know" rich.

> Dude, he also has a $70 million jet, which costs about as much as a yacht. Let's be honest here.

First, I am not your dude.

Second, please, read the comment before you respond. I addressed it.

$70M is a drop in the ocean when you are in tens of billions of dollars especially when it is your work tool that lets you move fast between locations and save couple of hours on each trip.

> First, I am not your dude.

Maybe you are?

Chiming I here. “Dude …” is a dumb thing to say in a debate. Please take take that over to Reddit.

Also chiming in here, it's not a big deal at all to call someone "dude", because this isn't a formal debate, it's just a web forum.

… the steady decline of HN over the decades …

The person complaining about saying "dude" already lowered the tone of the drasticaly debate by saying, apparently without a hint of irony, "stop thinking like a poor person." So I agree there's a lot of low quality, revolting posts here but the use "dude" doesn't really scratch the surface.

> “Dude …” is a dumb thing to say in a debate.

Is it insulting?

As a part of a retort in an argument, it’s similar to rolling one’s eyes. It’s also not substantive.

No, but it is annoying and when in a debate it tries to distract and/or claim some kind of familiarity or higher ground.

The comment I replied to had already lost any sort of higher ground at:

> stop thinking like a poor person.

Sure, but he's not your buddy, guy.

It's kinda cool that 19 friends and I could take a day trip on Elon Musk's yacht for $350 each.

The last boat I rented charged $200 for a 2 hour session and had a capacity of 12 plus you had to drive it yourself, so his would be a definite step up, but it's pretty modest for a billionaire.

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