It's beautiful engineering (if real), but all I can think about is the number of people that could be fed, housed, and educated for that amount of money.
The world could be made a permanently (slightly) better place instead of building this.
The world could be made a permanently (slightly) better place instead of building this.
It's ok if there's an excess of materials and the shipbuilders have nothing better to do.
More likely it will slightly drive up the prices of batteries, etc. And maybe the yacht builders would have otherwise gone to work making sailboats for normal-rich people, or gone into defense, driving down the price of labor there, and allowing taxpayers to get their next destroyer for a hair cheaper.
Or, worst case, there'd be no demand for these shipbuilders, and they'd have to reskill as something else. Maybe they know how to do fiberglass layups and would try making surfboards, I don't know.
In short, I don't worry so much about wasting money per-se, as about luring people and resources away from better uses.
Kind of like VC's role for the last 20 years. "Greatest minds of my generation", etc.
It does still feel like a poor use of the world's finite resources, but I completely understand how it's not the individuals place to allocate resources effectively.
And jobs are an opportunity cost - the people who would be working on this supervillain fantasy are not doing anything else. What could they, or would they be doing instead?
If building a submersible superyacht adds to the world, then well and good. Personally, I find the opportunity cost to humanity of doing so highly suspect. But I don't think I, or anyone, has a perfect picture of all the knock-on effects from particular money flows. (I think this is why a free market can have benefits.)
Jobs are not good because they are jobs, they are good because of what they accomplish, and should be measured by that yardstick.
Perhaps if the tax rate truly rose to somewhere near 99% as individuals reach the billionaire mark, we'd see whether these folks truly are philanthropists or if they just play them on TV.