The Bigger, The Better. (Yacht, ahoy!)

One of my not particularly guilty pleasures is watching Succession and Billions.

Succession, for those who haven't had the not particularly guilty pleasure, follows the scheming Roy family as the three adult offspring, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Kendall, Siobhan (a.k.a., Shiv), and Roman go to cut-throat war with each other and their father, Logan, to determine who'll gain control of the family's media empire when and if Logan passes on. 

The show is ridiculous, compelling, insane...And one of the best features is peeking in on how the mega ridiculous, compelling, insane mega-rich live. Some of the best peeks take place on Logan's yacht as it moseys around off the coast of Croatia. 

Money, money, money, money.

I resisted Billions for years, but once I unresisted, I was all in. Like Succession, Billions is ridiculous, compelling, insane. Instead of a family "squabble," Billions pits hedge-fundie Bobby "Axe" Axelrod (and, later in the series, another hedgie: Mike Prince) vs. wiley U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades. 

Naturally, Axe has a yacht.

Money, money, money, money.

I have no desire to keep company with hedge fund billionaires, fictional or non-fictional. 

Still...

While it's not likely to happen, and it's not exactly a bucket list item (good thing), I wouldn't mind being helicoptered onto a luxe yacht off the coast of somewhere and spending a few days lounging around sipping mimosas. 

The closest I've come to seeing one of these puppies IRL was occasionally spotting the relatively modest yacht, the Iroquois, of billionaire Red Sox owner John Henry  docked in back of Boston's Four Season Hotel. (I think he's upgraded to a larger yacht - 217 ft. vs. 164 ft. - the Elysian.)

Money, money, money, money.

Admittedly, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about yachts. But I do spend a little. So I was very interested in a recent New Yorker article on the rise (or is it the lengthening?) of the super yacht. 

It seems that, with the emergence of mo' "better" billionaires, it's boom times for superyachts and super-duper-yachts that can exceed 500 feet in length.

Yachts have become the "must have" indicator of wealth. 

Back in olden times - the Gilded Age - the most wanted was fine art, Old Masters etc. Interest in fine art lasted quite a while, only to be replaced by antique furniture (often pieces that survived the French Revolution, not meeting the fate of their owners who were tumbrel'd off to the guillotine). In more recent memory, the private plane became the "it" acquisition. 

And now, it's the superyacht. The bigger, the fancier, the longer, the more tricked out the better.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts....

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own....

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “a superyacht is a terrible asset,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Speaking of Van Goghs, some yacht owners hang pricey paintings on each floor of their yachts so that guests can help orient themselves. 

Length is one of the most important aspects of yacht competition, but it's "not usually length for length's sake." It's what you can do with that length.

One thing you can't do with that length is invite more friends to join you for a sea cruise. 

In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. 

You can easily end up with multiple crew members per passenger. 

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include imax theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Hmmmm. I'm guessing that there are plenty of assholes and ridiculous people in superyachts. Wild guess, I suppose.

...Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.” 

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY... 

Oh, what a world we live in.