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Christina O

• Amenities & Toys
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CHRISTINA O YACHT CHARTER

99.13m  /  325'3   canadian vickers   1943 / 2020.

• Previous Yacht

Cabin Configuration

• 14 Convertible

Special Features:

• Iconic superyacht
• Mosaic swimming pool turns into dancefloor
• Original features faithfully restored
• English country manor house style
• Glamorous bar

CHRISTINA O is one of the most iconic motor yachts ever launched, best known for her grand interiors and unrivalled level of luxurious amenities.

Starting life in World War Two as a Canadian frigate, Christina O was purchased in 1954 by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who transformed her into the most luxurious private yacht of her time. She went on to host a wealth of illustrious guests, ranging from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to John F Kennedy and Winston Churchill.

Onassis epitomised the life of the superyacht elite, garnering a reputation as the original jetsetter, but following his death in 1975, Christina O fell into disrepair. Luckily, a meticulous restoration project led by a family friend of Onassis was completed in 2001 and, today, charterers can enjoy the resonance of her unique past with the ultimate in luxurious accommodation and on-board service.   

Exterior Design

Styled in the early fifties by Caesar Pinnau, the exterior of Christina O easily stands out among other superyachts on today’s charter market thanks to her distinctive clipper bow, long sheer line, rounded superstructure and dazzling white topsides, and this is not forgetting her trademark, vibrant yellow funnel. A variety of vast open-air spaces across Christina O offer a multitude of options for lounging and socialising. The top level of the yacht, known as the compass deck, is well-primed for sunning, with a line of chaise loungers and a bar, while the spacious promenade deck below features an aft spa pool, and alfresco dining and bar setup. Most impressive is the main deck, where Onassis’ swimming pool has been faithfully restored with its renowned Minoan bull and vaulter mosaic. What’s more, the bottom of the pool can be raised to form a dance floor.

Interior Design

Christina O’s expansive interior was completely gutted during her most recent refit, with notable artefacts salvaged and sensitively restored. Aftermost on the main deck is the Lapis Lounge, named after its original lapis fireplace, which remains in place, and decorated in the style of an English country manor house. The main deck is also home to a dining salon with a 24-seater table, and the Aris Bar, which boasts its original rope-covered bar, whale fang bar handles and whale-skin bar stools. A majestic atrium with a striking mosaic of the Onassis omega logo then allows guests to access the two further salons on the promenade deck above via a spiral staircase.

Guest Accommodation

Known as the Onassis Suite, the yacht’s master stateroom stretches across the forward section of the bridge deck and comprises three rooms: large sleeping quarters, a white Penteli marble bathroom and a book-lined study. The latter is oak-panelled and boasts the original onyx fireplace, while the bedroom is illuminated by authentic Baccarat crystal wall lights, adding to its elegance.  The other accommodation on board comprises 10 double staterooms on the main deck forward and eight convertible cabins on the lower deck.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

As well as her impressive lounging and dining facilities, Christina O also features a unique variety of leisure and entertainment facilities, particularly on her promenade deck. These include an oak-panelled library with green upholstered chairs and settees, and a huge saloon, boasting three large seating areas. This space can also serve as a ballroom, with a raised dais for the orchestra, as well as a cinema thanks to a drop-down screen and state-of-the-art sound system. There is also a glass-panelled gymnasium on board and a music room with a Steinway piano where the likes of Maria Callas and Frank Sinatra once performed.

Performance & Range

Built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, she offers greater on-board space and is more stable when at anchor thanks to her full-displacement hull. Powered by twin MAN engines, she comfortably cruises at 15 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 19 knots with a range of up to 5,000 nautical miles from her 329,000 litre fuel tanks at 10 knots. An on board stabilization system ensures comfort when underway.

Onboard Christina O has a range of toys and accessories to keep you and your guests entertained on the water throughout your stay. Principle among these is a Flyboard, experience flying in and out of the water with the latest in high adrenaline watersport. Another excellent feature is a waterslide for guests of all ages to enjoy. Take to the sea on a Jet Ski offering you power and control on the water. If that isn't enough Christina O also features towable toys, kayaks, paddleboards and snorkelling equipment. Christina O features four tenders, but leading the pack is a Hacker Craft Limo Tender to transport you in style.

Why Charter Christina O

One of the most iconic superyachts available for charter, Christina O is distinctly steeped in stories of the rich and famous, who have once graced her decks. She is an ideal choice for those looking for an opulent charter vacation, enhanced with the ambience of a magnificent past. Plus, capable of accommodating 36 guests, she is perfect for larger parties set to experience the extraordinary lifestyle of the Onassis years.

Christina O is available upon request for charter this winter. She is already accepting bookings this summer for cruising in Bermuda and the Caribbean.

Showcasing meticulous craftsmanship coupled with high-end luxurious finishes, classic yacht Christina O certainly has the "wow" factor, along with state-of-the-art amenities and array of water toys, promising truly unforgettable yacht charters for even the most discerning guests.

TESTIMONIALS

There are currently no testimonials for Christina O, please provide .

Christina O Photos

Amenities & Entertainment

For your relaxation and entertainment Christina O has the following facilities, for more details please speak to your yacht charter broker.

Christina O is reported to be available to Charter with the following recreation facilities:

• 1 x Hacker Craft Varnished Wood Limo Tender with 1 x Volvo 250 HP engine
• 1 x Zodiac Medline 3 RIB with 2 x 150 HP engines
• 1 x Zodiac Medline 2 RIB

For a full list of all available amenities & entertainment facilities, or price to hire additional equipment please contact your broker.

• + shortlist

For a full list of all available amenities & entertainment facilities, or price to hire additional equipment please contact your broker.

APPROVED RYA WATER SPORTS CENTRE

Your family and friends could learn to use the water toys on your charter vacation onboard this luxury charter yacht. Motor Yacht Christina O is a certified RYA Training Centre yacht.

'Christina O' Charter Rates & Destinations

Summer Season

May - September

€700,000 p/week + expenses Approx $764,500

High Season

€740,000 p/week + expenses Approx $808,500

Cruising Regions

Bermuda Caribbean Antigua, Bahamas, Cuba, Saint Martin, St Barts Mediterranean Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Turkey

HOT SPOTS:   Amalfi Coast, Corsica, French Riviera, Ibiza, Mykonos, Sardinia, The Balearics, Virgin Islands

Winter Season

October - April

Please enquire .

Charter Christina O

To charter this luxury yacht contact your charter broker , or we can help you.

To charter this luxury yacht contact your charter broker or

On Board Review

As the former vessel of billionaire shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, the legendary 99m/325ft superyacht ‘Christina O’ set the scene for the original jetsetters of the late-1950s and, today, continues to be among the most world’s most famous yachts.

Follow in the footsteps of the original jet-setters aboard Christina O

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You Can Now Rent Jackie and Aristotle Onassis’s Former Yacht for $90,000 a Day

The greek shipping magnate's legendary yacht, which once hosted a-list stars, is now available to charter., max berlinger, max berlinger's most recent stories.

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In 1954, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian convoy escort and spent $4 million refurbishing it to his specifications, transforming it into a luxurious vessel fit for a man who made his fortune as the owner of fleets of ships. The yacht, christened the Christina O after his daughter, was a floating palace. Indeed, during the decades that he owned it, the ship became his de facto residence, headquarters, and vacation home, until his death in 1975.

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The ship was donated by his daughter (now deceased) to the Greek government in 1978 and acquired by a family friend in 1998 who then restored it (additional updates were made in 2015 and 2018). Today, the yacht and a slice of history and glamor that can be yours for the taking—or, more accurately, the renting—for a little under $100,000 a day.

The Christina O at sea.  Stef Bravin

Valef Yachts is now offering up charters of the luxurious vessel that hosted Jacqueline Kennedy, later to become Onassis’s wife, and a roster of glittering, high-profile A-listers like Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Princess Grace of Monaco. A one-night charter on the yacht will cost you €80,000 (or around $90,000) except during the high season (July and August) when that number jumps up to €90,000 (or $101,000).

Aristotle Onassis hosting guests, including Jacqueline Kennedy, on his yacht.  Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock

Of course for that price, this is one supremely luxurious cruise that comes equipped with everything you could imagine and a few things you can’t. The ship itself has been thoughtfully restored, and can accommodate up to 34 people in 17 cabins (but can host 250 for a party or event). It comes with a crew 38 strong, and it features a salt water swimming pool, jacuzzi, library, a fitness lounge (with therapists included), two massage rooms and a beauty parlor, a dance floor, a central atrium, and a bar.

Of course, as one astute legend pointed out, the yacht’s vast amenities were not even its most intoxicating quality:

“I don’t think there is a man or woman on earth who would not be seduced by the pure narcissism shamelessly flaunted on this boat,” Richard Burton famously said. “I have found that to be so.”

Now it’s your turn. 

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the Christina O. in 1975.  Harry Fox/Shutterstock

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CHRISTINA O Yacht – Paradise-like $40M Superyacht

Conceptualized by Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate, the Christina O entertained the stars of the 20th century.

Onassis hosted the likes of Winston Churchill, Grace Kelly, and Elizabeth Taylor. The $40 million yacht hosted legendary parties, scandals, and luxury on the first personal yacht.

CHRISTINA O yacht interior

After World War II, Onassis bought the River-class frigate and spent $4 million converting the vessel into a luxurious superyacht named after his daughter.

The opulence reflected his tastes, with a Minotaur-themed mosaic swimming pool that could be raised into a dance floor once drained.

Ari’s Bar had barstools upholstered with the foreskins of whales, with whales’ teeth as the footrests and ivory armrests.

The bathrooms were in marble, and the fittings were in gold. The fireplace in the famous Lapis Lazuli lounge was encrusted in lapis lazuli.

Illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans designed and painted the children’s dining room. When Onassis died, his daughter donated the boat to the Greek government, which let the masterpiece go to rot.

In 1999, she was bought back from the Greek government by John Paul Papanicolaou and completely gutted.

The CHRISTINA O yacht was refitted with replicas of the lavish features Onassis was so proud of. The interior of the yacht reflects an English country manor house style.

During the refit, more accommodation was added to the vessel. The staterooms are smaller compared to 21st-century yachts. CHRISTINA O has a master suite and 17 passenger staterooms.

She can accommodate 34 guests on board and 39 crew. A spiral staircase connects the many indoor and outdoor living spaces.

She lacks the indoor boat storage that is now standard on superyachts, but she has many living areas, and the deck space is very generous.

She also features a glass-paneled gym, a music room, and other luxury amenities. The compass deck features areas for lounging and sunbathing, while the deck below, called the promenade deck, had an aft spa pool and dining area.

She also has a tender garage filled with toys for fun on the water.

CHRISTINA O yacht exterior

Canadian Vickers built the CHRISTINA O yacht in 1943. She served in Normandy during WWII but later became a surplus relic.

Onassis bought the vessel for her scrap value. Onassis charged the Howaldt Shipyard in Germany with creating the lavish personal yacht.

Caesar Pinnau, a German professor of architecture, created classic lines and a high stern for the new and improved CHRISTINA O.

The classic yellow funnel remains to this day. While the yacht retains some of her rugged exteriors, she appears low-slung and eye-catching in the water.

CHRISTINA O yacht specifications

With a length of 99.1m, the CHRISTINA O yacht has a beam of 11.12m and a draft of 4.24m.

She has a volume of 1802 gross tons; she has a top speed of 19 knots and a cruising speed of 14 knots. Her MAN engines give her a range of 5000 nautical miles.

She was one of the first boats to fit an onboard stabilization system for guests’ comfort.

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How Aristotle Onassis Designed the World's First Superyacht

By Toby Skinner

Before the Christina O , the superyacht as we know it wasn’t a thing.

But in 1954, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis happened upon a slender, elegantly shaped anti-submarine frigate that had served at the D-Day landings, and paid its scrap value of $34,000. What happened next was typical of the Golden Greek: Naming the boat after his daughter, he spent almost $4 million creating the original floating pleasure palace, adding revolutionary touches like a helipad and the mosaic-tiled bottom of the seawater pool that would rise to become a dance floor at the touch of a button.

Soon Frank Sinatra was playing the Steinway or flirting with Marilyn Monroe on barstools made of whale foreskins at Ari’s Bar—where Winston Churchill is said to have thought that a young John F. Kennedy was a waiter when they first met in the mid-1950s. For all that went down on the 325-foot Christina O, the ship itself was influential, providing a blueprint for both design and hedonism to a generation of superyachts, especially those of fledgling boat designer Jon Bannenberg, whose interior design of Talitha G for the Getty family owed a debt to this original. After Onassis’s death, in 1975, Christina Onassis (shown above, at age 3, on board) donated her namesake to the Greek government, and the ship was allowed to decay until a 2001 overhaul, followed by another restoration 15 years later. Now it’s available to rent—if only those Spanish-galleon-timber walls could talk.

The Christina O can be chartered for $624,500 a week through Morley Yachts .

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Take a look at the glitzy yacht once owned by Jackie O that's been the scene of huge celebrity parties, has 17 cabins, and can now be rented for $100,000 a day

• The 325-foot yacht formerly owned by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis can now be rented for $100,000 per day, CNN and Robb Report recently reported.
• The couple frequently hosted famous guests aboard their ship, including Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe .
• Named the Christina O after Aristotle Onassis' daughter, the ship remains one of the only luxury yachts to accommodate a large number of passengers.

Jackie O's yacht can now be yours for a day — if you have $100,000 to drop on it, that is.

According to recent reports from CNN and Robb Report , interested parties can now rent the Christina O, the legendary superyacht that was formerly owned by millionaire shipping mogul Aristotle Onassis and former First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis .

With new updates made in 2015 and 2018 , Valef Yachts is now chartering the ship for € 90,000 , ($100,000) per day for the upcoming peak summer months and €80,000 ($90,000) during the low season. Rental also comes with additional fees and deposits for food, fuel, and other amenities.

Read more : Millennial superyacht owners are on the rise — and their preference for experiences over things may be turning yachting into a ride-sharing service

After Onassis' death in 1975 , his daughter — whom the yacht is named after — donated the vessel to the Greek government. The vessel, under the name the Argo, remained in government hands until the late 1990s, when a family friend purchased the ship at an auction, restored it to premium condition, and renamed it the Christina O to honor its history.

The Telegraph reported the ship was "once the most exclusive bar in the world," as the rich and famous gathered there by invitation only. Keep reading for a look inside the Christina O from the stateroom lounges to the outdoor Jacuzzi deck.

Originally a convoy escort called the Stormont, shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis purchased the yacht in 1954.

Onassis purchased the ship for just $34,000 , its scrap value. He then spent $4 million refurbishing the 325-foot vessel and named it the Christina after his daughter.

Until his death in 1975, the Christina served as both Onassis' residence and headquarters.

Onassis made his fortune in the shipping business, eventually owning one of the world's largest fleets . However, the Christina luxury yacht was considered his flagship vessel, as it served as both his office headquarters and as his "floating mansion."

Both Aristotle and Jackie frequently used the ship to entertain an impressive list of guests.

Aristotle and Jackie Onassis married in 1968, a wedding that shocked many fans still mourning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 

This list included Hollywood stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

In addition to celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Frank Sinatra , who graced the Christina during the 1970s, politicians such as Sir Winston Churchill and royalty such as Princess Grace of Monaco visited as well.

After Onassis' death, his daughter Christina donated the ship to the Greek government.

Onassis' friend John Paul Papanicolaou bought the vessel at an auction in 1998 .

He spent $50 million restoring the yacht to its former glory and renamed it the Christina O to honor its origins and family history.

Under its new name the Christina O, the vessel remains one of the only ships that can accommodate a large number of passengers.

It is one of the only superyachts capable of accommodating up to 34 guests overnight — and that's in addition to 38 crew members.

Guests have access to a variety of water toys that are included in the rental price.

Among the water toys included in the rental price of the Christina O are a hoverboard, water skis, and snorkel gear .

But the yacht comes with a serious price tag: Valef Yachts is currently chartering the yacht for € 90,000 , ($100,000) per day for July and August €80,000 ($90,000) during the low season, plus additional fees.

The yacht also boasts several additional watercraft.

The Christina O comes with several personal boats capable of carrying eight guests each, along with several tenders — smaller boats that serve as support to a large vessel , especially when docking is inconvenient or impossible.

When it comes to the yacht's interior, an immaculate spiral staircase leads up to the boat's suites.

The vessel is complete with 17 cabins .

All rooms are equipped with an en suite shower , along with televisions and stereo systems. All but two cabins are convertible from twin to double beds .

The master suite opens up to a private sitting area complete with library shelving.

The yacht has two lounges: the Lapis Lounge and the Callas Lounge.

The Callas Lounge is named after opera singer Marie Callas , with whom Aristotle Onassis had an affair . The pair began a relationship while they were both married. After divorcing their spouses, the relationship continued for several years until Onassis married Jackie Kennedy.

It also features a grand piano and an area for guests to enjoy drinks.

And then, there's the iconic Ari's Bar.

The bar, named after the late owner, remains well-preserved with its original orca teeth hooks and whale skin stools.

The bar top is made from a sunken Spanish galleon , while the footrests are engraved with scenes from epics "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

The yacht also features a gym space.

The gym is equipped with treadmills , elliptical bikes, and a free weights.

Along with two massage rooms, the Christina O has a beauty room.

Massage therapists and additional staff help are included in the cost of renting the boat.

In recent years, the yacht has seen several notable updates.

In 2018, the ship was re-fitted with a new cinema.

Several other upgrades were made in 2018, including new paint, a new swim platform, and updates to the Jacuzzi Deck.

Outside on the deck, guests can enjoy the sunshine.

The outdoor dining table on the Jacuzzi Deck seats eight guests. Lounge chairs are spread across the extensive sunbathing decks.

The mosaic pool doubles as a dance floor space when covered.

"The mosaic pool that converts into a dance floor and the famous bar evoke another era and absolute glamour," a PR representative for Valef Yachts told Business Insider.

Additional dining space on the ship means there's room for many guests.

While the dining room seats 40 , staff can also rearrange the deck furniture for larger gatherings. The Christina O is capable of carrying up to 157 guests while cruising and up to 250 guests while docked .

The ship is specifically outfitted to host large parties.

Today, the Christina O remains one of the few superyachts capable of accommodating up to 34 guests across 17 cabins.

Most yachts — even oversized vessels — rarely accommodate more than 12 people .

On top of that, the yacht can accommodate hundreds for daytime cruising or evening events, such as weddings and private parties.

• Main content

You can now Charter the “Floating Palace” Yacht of Aristotle Onassis

It is now possible to charter the luxurious yacht of Aristotle Onassis. Greek shipping magnate Onassis and his wife, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, enjoyed a lifestyle in the late 1960s that was endlessly talked about, particularly when gossip columnists speculated on life aboard the couple’s 325-foot-long yacht. After Onassis’s death, the yacht, Christina O, had a life of its own, and now,  following a huge restoration, it is available for people to charter–for $100,000 per day during the summer.

“It was once the most exclusive bar in the world, where stellar fame and fortune gathered by invitation only,” according to The Telegraph.

In Onassis’s lifetime the yacht was referred to as a “floating palace,” and among its guests were Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, and Princess Grace of Monaco. It was also where Jackie and Onassis held their wedding reception in October 1968.

“I don’t think there is a man or woman on earth who would not be seduced by the pure narcissism shamelessly flaunted on this boat,” Richard Burton reportedly said. “I have found that to be so.”

The Christina O can today fit up to 36 guests in 19 staterooms, according to Valef Yachts. It “is for charter all over the Mediterranean in the summer season and in the winter she charters in the Caribbean,” said Kassandra Lefakinis of Valef Yachts. It comes with a crew of 38 and features a saltwater swimming pool, jacuzzi, library, a fitness lounge (with therapists included), two massage rooms and a beauty parlor, a dance floor, a central atrium, and a bar, said the Robb Report.

Onassis bought the vessel as naval scrap for $34,000 after World War Two. He then spent at least $5 million improving it, and named it after his daughter, Christina, from his first marriage. As well as being a floating party for the A-list, the yacht was where Onassis conducted much of his business.

He had a net worth of $500 million at the time of his death. In 2003, when his granddaughter, Athina Onassis Roussel Athina Onassis Roussel, turned 18, she inherited one of the world’s most renowned shipping empires. The media suggested that Athina’s inheritance, held in trust since her mother, Christina, passed away in 1988, was then worth as much as $3 billion. She inherited luxury real estate in London, Paris, and St. Moritz as well as the Greek island of Skorpios.

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According to The Telegraph, “He was a compulsive wheeler and dealer…  For Onassis, corporate empire-building eventually became a game. He said, ‘After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.’ ”

Onassis was for years involved with the opera star Maria Callas, but he married a much younger Jacqueline Kennedy, “the world’s most beloved widow,” which horrified some of her admirers. “The gods are weeping,” said The Washington Post. A German newspaper announced: “America has lost a saint.”

The former first lady would later say that Onassis “rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows.” In 1973, Onassis’s son, Alexander, perished in a plane crash. From then on, his health fell apart, and in 1975, he died of respiratory failure. His widow received $10 million, although the amount is disputed.

Onassis’s daughter inherited the yacht, but she donated it to the Greek government. It fell into decay before being sold in auction to another Greek shipping magnate, John Paul Papanicolaou. He reportedly spent $50 million to restore it to its former glory.

Related Article: Jacqueline Kennedy’s packing list for tragic Dallas trip becomes public

Barrons said, “When guests are ready to leave the vessel, there is a hydraulic swim platform, two Sea-Doo Spark jet skis, a hoverboard, and a flyboard. There are also two Hacker-Craft passenger boats, which each carry eight passengers.” All aboard for anybody who wishes to charter the history and luxury of Aristotle Onassis’ legendary yacht.

Nancy Bilyeau ,  a former staff editor at Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and InStyle, has written a trilogy of historical thrillers for Touchstone Books. Her new book, The Blue, is a spy story set in the 18th-century porcelain world. For more information, go to www.nancybilyeau.com

Jackie and Aristotle Onassis's Former Yacht Is Available to Rent

The luxury ship was frequented by the likes of Winston Churchill and Marilyn Monroe.

Charter company Morley Yachts has made the ship available to charter , for a mere €740,000 a week ($814,133) during the high season. The Christina O's luxurious offerings include a main suite, 17 guest cabins with ensuite showers, a dining room for up to 40 guests, a swimming pool that converts to a dance floor, and more.

The boat's allure has been well-documented, having lured the likes of Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and more onboard. Actor Richard Burton once had a telling conversation about the yacht's power, per the Telegraph . "I don’t think there is a man or woman on earth who would not be seduced by the pure narcissism shamelessly flaunted on this boat," Burton said, to which Aristotle replied, "I have found that to be so."

When he described the Christina O himself, Aristotle tended to be blunt. "Madame," he would often tell women aboard, "You are sitting on the largest penis in the world."

The boat also hosted Jackie 's wedding to Aristotle in 1968, after which she'd be a frequent guest aboard the Christina O, until they divorced in 1975.

Recently, Christina O featured in the Triangle of Sadness , Ruben Östlund's Best Picture nominated film, and in The Crown season five , recreating Princess Diana and Prince Charles's 1991 trip to Italy .

The Christina O was acquired by new owners in 2023. "When people come on board Christina O they typically have an emotional reaction," Tim Morley, who runs Morley Yachts, told Robb Report . "People love it—and it affects almost everybody in this way, young and old."

Chloe is a News Writer for Townandcountrymag.com , where she covers royal news, from the latest additions to Meghan Markle’s staff to Queen Elizabeth’s monochrome fashions ; she also writes about culture, often dissecting TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Killing Eve .

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

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.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

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In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

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. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. 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. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

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.”

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.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that!  ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

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Rupert Murdoch, 92, Is Engaged for the Second Time in 12 Months—This Time to a Woman He Met Through His Third Wife

But i want to talk about his boat..

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When I tell people about our package on American oligarchy at Mother Jones , everyone wants to know about the yachts .

As I wrote in an essay for the magazine, these gleaming vessels have come to symbolize both the decadence and detachment of Russia’s ultra-wealthy and our own. And they are full of some absolutely ridiculous shit: submarines and helicopter hangars, sculptures of spouses preening off the bow, climbing walls, anti-paparazzi lasers, drone-detection systems, gold-leaf ceilings, IMAX theaters. The former owner of Tottenham Hotspur installed a padel court on the yacht where he used to conduct his business deals. (Are you familiar with padel? It’s sort of like pickleball for people who do insider trading .)

But there’s one yacht that I’ve come to think of as sort of the yacht of yachts. The Christina O is not the biggest superyacht in the world; at 325 feet, it is a full 265 feet shorter than the royal family of Abu Dhabi’s pleasure craft, Azzam . But the Christina O is unsurpassed in both its rich-guy history and rich-guy taste. It was built for Aristotle Onassis in the 1950s, played host to Jackie Kennedy, and served as Grace Kelly’s wedding venue when she married the Prince of Monaco. It also had a swimming pool that turned into a dance floor and bar stools made out of whale foreskins, so that Onassis could tell women that they were “sitting on the largest penis in the world.” The dance floor became a recurring feature in the industry; the seats, as far as I know, did not.

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It wasn’t just its life under Onassis, though, that gives the Christina O its mystique. The ship has has had an illustrious afterlife as a for-charter vessel, at the low price of $800,000-a-week . It was a filming location for The Crown , and for an Angelina Jolie movie about Maria Callas (one of Onassis’ lovers), and for the 2022 Academy-Award-nominee, Triangle of Sadness , which is about a group of wealthy tourists who end up submerged in sewage and attacked by pirates after arguing about capitalism. Heidi Klum got married on it. And in the summer of 2023, a year after finalizing his divorce with his fourth-wife Jerry Hall, it’s where Rupert Murdoch retreated for a Mediterranean cruise with two of his daughters; his third ex-wife Wendy Deng; and one of Deng’s good friends—a molecular biologist named Elena Zhukova.

As they soaked in the sun in Naples and Corfu, the Daily Mail reported that Murdoch and Zhukova were more than friends. “He’s got the energy of people half his age,” a source helpfully told Matt Drudge. “He just might be in love again.” On Friday the New York Times confirmed that the 92-going-on-46-year-old Murdoch and 66-year-old Zhukova are officially engaged. There’s just something about that ship!

Murdoch, you know by now—he is the conservative media mogul “who has done more damage to the United States,” former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told Sean Kelly in Mother Jones earlier this year, than any other person alive. But Zhukova is an equally compelling figure in oligarch circles. 

Born in the USSR, she emigrated to the US to work at Baylor College of Medicine and ended up researching diabetes at UCLA. She was married for a while to a Russian billionaire investor , Alexander Zhukov, and they had a daughter, Dasha Zhukova, but Alexander and Elena had divorced before Alexander made most of his money. Then in 2008, Dasha Zhukova also married a Russian billionaire investor—Roman Abramovich, an oligarch who made his first fortune when he scooped up a state-owned oil company at cents on the dollar and eventually built the world’s third-largest yacht, Eclipse . The couple got big into art collecting and curation, and even started a contemporary art museum in St. Petersburg. The younger Zhukova also struck up a friendship with Murdoch’s third-wife (at the time), and when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he was making Abramovich an “honorary citizen” of New York City in 2013, Deng was in attendance .

Murdoch divorced Deng and married Jerry Hall, and then Murdoch and Hall divorced too. Roman and Dasha divorced in 2018, and Dasha Zhukova ended up remarrying a year later to the Greek billionaire Stavros Niarchos III—who was, to bring this full circle, the grandson of Stravros Niarchos I, a famous yacht owner, and the person Onassis was trying to one-up when he decided to build a sprawling luxury yacht stuffed with whale foreskins.

That’s a lot to sift through, but that’s sort of the point: Once you start reading about rich people and their yachts, you realize that you can never stop reading about rich people and their yachts. You are always , on some level, reading about rich people and their yachts, even if it seems like you are reading about art or politics or soccer . It’s like discovering some hidden fabric of the universe that binds and connects everyone with an offshore bank account and three or more wives.

This is Murdoch’s second engagement in the last year. Last March, less than a year after he divorced Hall, he announced impending nuptials with Ann Lesley Smith, a Los Angeles dental hygienist who met Murdoch either—accounts vary—at the same southern California vineyard where he is about to marry Zhukova or at his ranch in Montana, where, The Guardian reported , “the former dental hygienist was said to have offered to check his cavities.” 

Smith, who had been married three times, referred to their union as a “ gift from God .” That engagement ended after two weeks.

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Monuments to the Onasis era of Olympic Airways

The Mount Olympus, an old Boeing 727 of Olympic Airways, which was founded by Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1957, has been dismantled 24 years after it stopped flying so that it could be moved to its new home, on Vouliagmenis Avenue, a few meters from the Elliniko metro stop.

The decision by its new owner, Cypriot businessman Andreas Christodoulides, who bought it along with another Onassis Olympic Airways-era plane, which is now in Lavrio, where it is being restored, is to showcase an era of modern Greek history.

“These airplanes are historic for Greece and Hellenism, the Olympic airplanes should be remembered by the world and our children and our grandchildren,” he says.

His goal was to buy them for the public to view and appreciate. A great admirer of Onassis, Christodoulides said he bought the planes so that the Greeks would not forget – “so that the world remembers Elliniko [Athens’ former airport), Olympic and Onassis.”

“I feel proud of Greece… it is as if I have bought the Acropolis, and I am putting it somewhere for Hellenism to see.”

Christodoulides has for the last 18 years been the owner of Zela Aviation, while about two years ago, when he returned to Greece from London after 38 years, he founded its subsidiary, Zela Jets.

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Soviet Hotel In Moscow To Be Razed

By Sabrina Tavernise

• Jan. 9, 2002

A hulking glass, stone and concrete 1970 eyesore in the heart of Moscow, the Intourist Hotel, shut its doors for good today and awaits demolition, as the city prepares to remove a major Soviet-era wart from its skyline for the first time since the fall of Communism.

The hotel, owned by the Moscow city government and situated half a block from the Kremlin at 3 Tverskaya Street, is 22 stories if you include the karaoke Chinese restaurant in the basement. The city says it wants a more glamorous, smaller building -- 12 stories are planned -- to better fit the otherwise elegant block, which includes a theater and another hotel, built in 1903.

The demolition is purely cosmetic, authorities say, and not related to security concerns raised worldwide after the terrorist attacks on the United States in September. Moscow is in talks with Hilton, the international hotel chain, over the management of the new hotel.

As Russia's economy expands and state-owned stores and restaurants are gradually replaced by private enterprises, hotels like the Intourist have become relics of the past.

Built for foreign visitors, who by Soviet rules were required to stay in special locations under supervision, the hotel was a strange combination of East meets West as guests rubbed up against traders looking to make an illegal buck.

The 434-room hotel was erected in 1970, at the end of an unfortunate building streak that led to the bulldozing of sections of this city's historic downtown district.

The hotel served many noted -- and notorious -- guests over the last three decades, including French and Russian astronauts. Aristotle Onassis, according to the Russian daily Izvestiya, was rebuffed by the Soviet government in an attempt to build his own hotel on the spot.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, one of the most powerful crime figures in Moscow, Otari Kvantrishvili, rented an office in the hotel before he was assassinated in 1994. Two years ago, a bomb ripped through the top two floors in what authorities believe was part of a business dispute. And in a moment fondly remembered by many of the hotel's employees, a leading actress in a Mexican soap opera that was highly popular in the 1990's, called ''The Rich Also Cry,'' came for a brief stay.

Today, a white piano, locked up and benchless, was the only thing that remained in the hotel's first-floor atrium, where guests used to sit and sip tea. Tables were stacked, chairs gone, and the central fountain no longer spouted. A woman worker removed lacquered Russian dolls from a glass cabinet nearby.

Up on the fourth floor, 64-year-old Zoya Timoshina, the hotel's main cashier for all of its 31 years, was shuffling through papers in her small office, preparing for her departure. The hotel's closing leaves approximately 450 employees without jobs, according to its management.

''It's sad to leave, but it is time,'' she said, looking wistfully around her small office. ''I came here as a young beauty, and now am going away as a grandmother. We earned good money. I had a driver, and a heater in my room. It's a good building. They have these in America.''

The hotel's management opposes the demolition, which so far does not have an official starting date and will be done piece by piece with cranes instead of explosives. They say the hotel was profitable and could have been upgraded for much less than the $130 million the city expects is needed to rebuild completely. And compared with prices in the hundreds of dollars at the prestigious five-star hotels nearby, the National and Metropole, the Intourist was a bargain.

''We charged $50 a night for a room in the center of Moscow -- what do you want?'' said Alexander Kolesnikov, deputy director of the hotel, responding to criticism that the building is unsightly. ''Tourists loved this place. We had almost a 100 percent occupancy rate. Every epoch has its buildings. Why do we need to destroy this one? What about the McDonald's nearby -- does that fit?''

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Inside Russia’s penal colonies: A look at life for political prisoners caught in Putin’s crackdowns

FILE In this file photo made from video provided by the Moscow City Court on Feb. 3, 2021, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny makes a heart gesture standing in a cage during a hearing to a motion from the Russian prison service to convert the suspended sentence of Navalny from the 2014 criminal conviction into a real prison term in the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, has become Russia’s most famous political prisoner. He is serving a nine-year term due to end in 2030 on charges widely seen as trumped up, and is facing another trial on new charges that could keep him locked up for another two decades. (Moscow City Court via AP, File)

FILE Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny looks at photographers standing behind a glass of the cage in the Babuskinsky District Court in Moscow, Russia, on Feb. 20, 2021. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, has become Russia’s most famous political prisoner. He is serving a nine-year term due to end in 2030 on charges widely seen as trumped up, and is facing another trial on new charges that could keep him locked up for another two decades. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File)

FILE - Detained protesters are escorted by police during a protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Jan. 31, 2021. Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, counted 558 political prisoners in the country as of April -- more than three times higher than in 2018, when it listed 183. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Opposition leader Alexey Navalny, speaks with riot police officers blocking the way during a protest rally against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s rule in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Feb. 25, 2012. Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe, has become Russia’s most famous political prisoner. He is serving a nine-year term due to end in 2030 on charges widely seen as trumped up, and is facing another trial on new charges that could keep him locked up for another two decades. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Police block a protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on Jan. 23, 2021. Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, counted 558 political prisoners in the country as of April -- more than three times higher than in 2018, when it listed 183. (AP Photo, file)

FILE Sasha Skochilenko, a 32-year-old artist and musician, stands in a defendant’s cage in a courtroom during a hearing in the Vasileostrovsky district court in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 13, 2022. Skochilenko is in detention amid her ongoing trial following her April 2022 arrest in St. Petersburg on the charges of spreading false information about the army. She has spent over a year behind bars. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza is escorted to a hearing in a court in Moscow, Russia, Feb. 8, 2023. Kara-Murza, another top Russian opposition figure, was sentenced last month to 25 years on treason charges. (AP Photo, File)

FILE In this handout photo released by the Moscow City Court, Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza stands in a glass cage in a courtroom at the Moscow City Court in Moscow, on April 17, 2023. Kara-Murza, another top Russian opposition figure, was sentenced last month to 25 years on treason charges. (The Moscow City Court via AP, File)

FILE - Alexei Gorinov holds a sign “I am against the war” standing in a cage during hearing in the courtroom in Moscow, Russia, on June 21, 2022. Gorinov, a former member of a Moscow municipal council, was convicted of “spreading false information” about the army in July over antiwar remarks he made at a council session. Criticism of the invasion was criminalized a few months earlier, and Gorinov, 61, became the first Russian sent to prison for it, receiving seven years. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Andrei Pivovarov, former head of Open Russia movement stands behind the glass during a court session in Krasnodar, Russia, on June 2, 2021. Pivovarov, an opposition figure sentenced last year to four years in prison, has been in isolation at Penal Colony No. 7 in northern Russia’s Karelia region since January and is likely to stay there the rest of this year. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Andrei Pivovarov, former head of Open Russia movement, speaks with media in Moscow, Russia, on July 9, 2020. Pivovarov, an opposition figure sentenced last year to four years in prison, has been in isolation at Penal Colony No. 7 in northern Russia’s Karelia region since January and is likely to stay there the rest of this year. (AP Photo/Denis Kaminev, File)

FILE - Riot police detain two young men at a demonstration in Moscow, Russia, on Sept. 21, 2022. Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, counted 558 political prisoners in the country as of April -- more than three times higher than in 2018, when it listed 183. (AP Photo, File)

• Copy Link copied

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When Alexei Navalny turns 47 on Sunday, he’ll wake up in a bare concrete cell with hardly any natural light.

He won’t be able to see or talk to any of his loved ones. Phone calls and visits are banned for those in “punishment isolation” cells, a 2-by-3-meter (6 1/2-by-10-foot) space. Guards usually blast patriotic songs and speeches by President Vladimir Putin at him.

“Guess who is the champion of listening to Putin’s speeches? Who listens to them for hours and falls asleep to them?” Navalny said recently in a typically sardonic social media post via his attorneys from Penal Colony No. 6 in the Vladimir region east of Moscow.

He is serving a nine-year term due to end in 2030 on charges widely seen as trumped up, and is facing another trial on new charges that could keep him locked up for another two decades. Rallies have been called for Sunday in Russia to support him.

Navalny has become Russia’s most famous political prisoner — and not just because of his prominence as Putin’s fiercest political foe, his poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin, and his being the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.

He has chronicled his arbitrary placement in isolation, where he has spent almost six months. He’s on a meager prison diet, restricted on how much time he can spend writing letters and forced at times to live with a cellmate with poor personal hygiene, making life even more miserable.

Most of the attention goes to Navalny and other high-profile figures like Vladimir Kara-Murza , who was sentenced last month to 25 years on treason charges. But there’s a growing number of less-famous prisoners who are serving time in similarly harsh conditions.

Memorial, Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organization and a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, counted 558 political prisoners in the country as of April — more than three times the figure than in 2018, when it listed 183.

The Soviet Union’s far-flung gulag system of prison camps provided inmate labor to develop industries such as mining and logging. While conditions vary among modern-day penal colonies , Russian law still permits prisoners to work on jobs like sewing uniforms for soldiers.

In a 2021 report, the U.S. State Department said conditions in Russian prisons and detention centers “were often harsh and life threatening. Overcrowding, abuse by guards and inmates, limited access to health care, food shortages and inadequate sanitation were common in prisons, penal colonies, and other detention facilities.”

Andrei Pivovarov , an opposition figure sentenced last year to four years in prison, has been in isolation at Penal Colony No. 7 in northern Russia’s Karelia region since January and is likely to stay there the rest of this year, said his partner, Tatyana Usmanova. The institution is notorious for its harsh conditions and reports of torture.

The 41-year-old former head of the pro-democracy group Open Russia spends his days alone in a small cell in a “strict detention” unit, and is not allowed any calls or visits from anyone but his lawyers, Usmanova told The Associated Press. He can get one book from the prison library, can write letters for several hours a day and is permitted 90 minutes outdoors, she said.

Other inmates are prohibited from making eye contact with Pivovarov in the corridors, contributing to his “maximum isolation,” she said.

“It wasn’t enough to sentence him to a real prison term. They are also trying to ruin his life there,” Usmanova added.

Pivovarov was pulled off a Warsaw-bound flight just before takeoff from St. Petersburg in May 2021 and taken to the southern city of Krasnodar. Authorities accused him of engaging with an “undesirable” organization -– a crime since 2015.

Several days before his arrest, Open Russia had disbanded after getting the “undesirable” label.

After his trial in Krasnodar, the St. Petersburg native was convicted and sentenced in July, when Russia’s war in Ukraine and Putin’s sweeping crackdown on dissent were in full swing.

He told AP in a letter from Krasnodar in December that authorities moved him there “to hide me farther away” from his hometown and Moscow. That interview was one of the last Pivovarov was able to give, describing prison life there as “boring and depressing,” with his only diversion being an hour-long walk in a small yard. “Lucky” inmates with cash in their accounts can shop at a prison store once a week for 10 minutes but otherwise must stay in their cells, he wrote.

Letters from supporters lift his spirits, he said. Many people wrote that they used to be uninterested in Russian politics, according to Pivovarov, and “only now are starting to see clearly.”

Now, any letters take weeks to arrive, Usmanova said.

Conditions are easier for some less-famous political prisoners like Alexei Gorinov , a former member of a Moscow municipal council. He was was convicted of “spreading false information” about the army in July over antiwar remarks he made at a council session.

Criticism of the invasion was criminalized a few months earlier, and Gorinov, 61, became the first Russian sent to prison for it, receiving seven years.

He is housed in barracks with about 50 others in his unit at Penal Colony No. 2 in the Vladimir region, Gorinov said in written answers passed to AP in March.

The long sentence for a low-profile activist shocked many, and Gorinov said “authorities needed an example they could showcase to others (of) an ordinary person, rather than a public figure.”

Inmates in his unit can watch TV, and play chess, backgammon or table tennis. There’s a small kitchen to brew tea or coffee between meals, and they can have food from personal supplies.

But Gorinov said prison officials still carry out “enhanced control” of the unit, and he and two other inmates get special checks every two hours, since they’ve been labeled “prone to escape.”

There is little medical help, he said.

“Right now, I’m not feeling all that well, as I can’t recover from bronchitis,” he said, adding that he needed treatment for pneumonia last winter at another prison’s hospital ward, because at Penal Colony No. 2, the most they can do is “break a fever.”

Also suffering health problems is artist and musician Sasha Skochilenko, who is detained amid her ongoing trial following her April 2022 arrest in St. Petersburg, also on charges of spreading false information about the army. Her crime was replacing supermarket price tags with antiwar slogans in protest.

Skochilenko has a congenital heart defect and celiac disease, requiring a gluten-free diet. She gets food parcels weekly, but there is a weight limit, and the 32-year-old can’t eat “half the things they give her there,” said her partner, Sophia Subbotina.

There’s a stark difference between detention facilities for women and men, and Skochilenko has it easier in some ways than male prisoners, Subbotina said.

“Oddly enough, the staff are mostly nice. Mostly they are women, they are quite friendly, they will give helpful tips and they have a very good attitude toward Sasha,” Subbotina told AP by phone.

“Often they support Sasha, they tell her: ‘You will definitely get out of here soon, this is so unfair here.’ They know about our relationship and they are fine with it. They’re very humane,” she said.

There’s no political propaganda in the jail and dance music blares from a radio. Cooking shows play on TV. Skochilenko “wouldn’t watch them in normal life, but in jail, it’s a distraction,” Subbotina said.

She recently arranged for an outside cardiologist to examine Skochilneko and since March has been allowed to visit her twice a month.

Subbotina gets emotional when she recalled their first visit.

“It is a complex and weird feeling when you’ve been living with a person. Sasha and I have been together for over six years — waking up with them, falling asleep with them — then not being able to see them for a year,” she said. “I was nervous when I went to visit her. I didn’t know what I would say to Sasha, but in the end, it went really well.”

Still, Subbotina said a year behind bars has been hard on Skochilenko. The trial is moving slowly, unlike usually swift proceedings for high-profile political activists, with guilty verdicts almost a certainty.

Skochilenko faces up to 10 years if convicted.