Notes

Quiet luxury. You’ll have seen them if you’ve been to Miami or Monaco, or perhaps you’ve read of Russian billionaires having theirs seized off the coast of Greece or Spain: the superyachts. They’re huge—and hugely expensive: Jeff Bezos’s 127-meter Koru cost him half a billion dollars and has a mast so tall that after its construction it couldn’t sail under Rotterdam’s iconic Koningshaven Bridge. Dissemble the bridge, Bezos suggested. Locals replied, threatening to pelt Koru with eggs.

And there are now more and more of them. Since 1990, the number of yachts longer than 250 feet (76.2 meters) has gone from less than 10 to more than 170. In the past 20 years, the average length of a yacht has grown by a third, to 160 feet. But they’re terrible assets. As the Financial Times once put it, “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.”

So why buy them?

—Gustav Jönsson