Haves' guide to the lives of have-yachts
The most expensive car is worth only around $30mn and the most expensive watch, $55mn. If you're a billionaire, neither will make you stand out in a 'crowd' of 3,000-plus other billionaires, collectively worth over $16tn. But stand out you must, because 'esteem' or 'status' is the fourth rung of the human hierarchy of needs, as psychologist Abraham Maslow declared 82 years ago.
You could buy a mansion, but the costliest on the market is worth some $300mn. On a good day, Elon Musk makes twice as much. Yachts are a better bet. The costliest is rumoured worth $4.8bn – just shy of Trump's net worth – and even relatively modest ones, like Jeff Bezos' $500mn 'Koru', cost many thousands of dollars per hour to maintain. There's no return on investment here, only loss, and if you're brave enough to bleed dollars without noticing, sociologists will now place you above the 'haves' as a 'have-yacht'.
In his new book The Haves and Have-Yachts, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos dwells on this super-wealthy class and its quirks. In 2022, he'd written an article – The Floating World – focused on owners of 'gigayachts', that is yachts longer than 295ft, which already numbered around 100 then. But the book, which is a collection of his New Yorker essays on the super-wealthy – hence subtitled Dispatches on the Ultrarich – explores their attitudes, illustrated by actions.
While Musk, possibly the wealthiest man in history, talks about settling Mars, other ultrarich have been making D-Day plans for Earth. Osnos writes about Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, who got eye surgery done at 33 to improve his odds of surviving a disaster. Antonio Garcia Martinez, who used to be product manager at Facebook, bought five acres of woods on an island, and installed generators and solar panels there. What raised eyebrows, though, was his decision to bring thousands of rounds of ammunition. 'I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now,' he told Osnos.
This survivalist streak also drives yacht-buying, says Osnos. Billionaire Peter Thiel, whose name crops up regularly in connection with America's rightward swing, has been known to fund the Seasteading Institute, whose mission is to 'enable floating societies which will allow the next generation of pioneers to test new ideas for govt'. Their website mentions 'building startup communities that float on the ocean with any measure of political autonomy.' Read together, 'new ideas for government' and 'political autonomy' suggest a real estate analogue of cryptocurrency.
One of Osnos' essays, 'Ghost in the Machine', offers a peek inside the money-making empires of tech moguls. For example, when Facebook Live faced the problem of livestreamed suicides, its chief technology officer sent an internal memo: 'Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.'
To ordinary mortals, who satisfy Maslow's fourth level of needs with a new bag or a pair of shoes, these ideas and attitudes may be troubling, but it's important to be acquainted with them, to understand the forces shaping our world.
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