motor yacht nabila

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The story of Donald Trump’s superyacht: The Trump Princess

Donald Trump loves a good deal

In 1988, the successful businessman Donald Trump bought the 86m Benetti build superyacht Nabila . He renamed her Trump Princess and used it until 1991.

For a superyacht built in 1980, Nabila was an impressive vessel. She was built for Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi that paid $100 million for it and named after his daughter. Khashoggi is known for his involvement in arms dealing. His net worth was around $4 billion in the early 1980's.

When Khashoggi ran into financial trouble in the mid-1980's he took a loan of $50 million and put Nabila as collateral. He defaulted on the loan in 1987 and a Swiss holding company took possession of the yacht. It was placed with yacht specialist Burgess for a quick sale at an asking price of $50 million.

Learning that Nabila is for sale, Trump made a bid. Burgess had already two other offers, but Trump's bid was more appealing. A Burgess agent flew to New York and made Trump a proposal for $32 million. The sale was settled at $30 million. A bargain, for a yacht he never set foot on.

Trump refitted the vessel and named it Trump Princess .

Why did Trump buy the yacht? He does not like water sports, he's not keen on swimming and always tried to avoid the sun. He never owned a big boat before. He doesn't even like boats.

He was charmed by a "certain level of quality" and admitted that it's an incredible toy and a work of art. "I was buying a great piece of art at a ridiculously low price."

Unlike Trump, Khashoggi loved boats. He acquired his first yacht when his was 18 and traded up as his wealth increased.

In the 70's he owned two yachts but wanted something out of this world. So, he commissioned British designer Jon Bannenberg to draw the most impressive and sumptuous yacht.

Khashoggi didn't stop here he employed Italian designer Luigi Sturchio to produce an interior that is believed to have cost more than the yacht itself.

Also, he wanted the ship to be completely self-contained and included everything in the specifications: from a patisserie and a hair salon to a cinema room with an 800-film library and a hospital with an operating room.

Nabila had crew quarters for a staff of 52 people. It had a helicopter landing pad and two nine meter tenders. The fuel tanks were big enough for 8,500 nautical miles when cruising at 17.5 knots. It had three water-makers capable to produce 45.000 liters of fresh water from the ocean. Also, it had six huge refrigerators that could store a three-month supply of food for 100 people.

For Khashoggi and later for Trump, this vessel was an invaluable business instrument. Movie stars, political leaders and diplomats were invited on board. It is believed the yacht had 150 telephones and satellite communications in order for business sales to be arranged.

The yacht has five decks and more than 100 separate areas. The owner's suite is a full-beam area with a three meter wide bed. It has a dressing room and an impressive bathroom with onyx tiles. Next to the bedroom, there is a television room, a large sitting area and a private elevator that takes the owner to his private sundeck. The yacht has another two elevators on board, one for guests, one for crew.

Trump spent another $8.5 million for refitting the yacht at Amels in the Netherlands. Renamed Trump Princess , she set sail from the Azores to arrive in New York on July 4, 1988, in time for a huge party Trump threw on the yacht.

Like the previous owner, Trump used the yacht mostly for business. But not for long. In 1991, Trump sold the ship to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal for $20 million. The Prince renamed the yacht Kingdom 5KR , the name under she still sails today.

For more about Donald Trump's Joy Rides click here .

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The Legendary Nabila   Yacht

The Nabila yacht was built at Benetti's shipyards in Viareggio and delivered in 1980. Measuring 281 feet and featuring 11 suites, a cinema and helipad, she was one of the world's largest yachts at the time and without doubt the most opulent. In 1983 the Nabila played an important role in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again ; a few years later she was seized by the Sultan of Brunei and sold to Donald Trump.

She was bought by her current owner, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, in 1991. The photo below shows her berthed at Antibes, France.

Adnan Khashoggi

The Nabila was commissioned in 1978 by billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Named after Khashoggi's daughter, she was built at Benetti's shipyards in Viareggio and delivered in July 1980. Interior design was managed by Luigi Sturchio; the exterior was designed by English-Australian yacht designer Jon Bannenberg . The yacht was powered by twin Nohap Polar engines, giving her a cruising speed of 17 knots and a top speed of 20 knots.

The Nabila soon became known the world over for her sumptuous interiors, opulent suites and ostentatious luxury. The yacht spanned 5 five decks and featured every conceivable amenity. The 11 suites were paneled with chamois leather and bird's-eye maple; bathrooms were decked out in gold and onyx. Khashoggi's suite not only had its own saloon, office and sauna, it also had an elevator that went up to a private sun lounge.

The main saloon featured a waterfall, bronze bar, and grand piano gifted to Khashoggi's wife by Liberace. Other amenities included a 12-seat cinema, a disco, and a medical clinic with its own operating theatre. No one really knows how much the yacht cost to build, though some estimates give $35 million for the exterior and $50 million for the interiors.

It's a spectacle, a statement of astronomic wealth, a massive piece of equipment designed to arouse envy in those who behold it.

New York Magazine, 1988

The Nabila had a major impact on the global yachting scene and changed the industry in two significant ways. First, her flamboyant Saudi Arabian owner inspired other Middle Eastern businessmen to commission luxury yachts of their own. The trend began in the early 1980s and continues to this day. Second, her innovative design and extravagant interiors opened eyes to what could truly be achieved if money were no object.

The Nabila yacht had 11 suites, all named after precious stones or metals. The bedroom shown here is the Ruby Suite. The other photo shows part of the main saloon, with the bronze bar visible on the left.

Khashoggi and Benetti: Financial Ruin

Adnan Khashoggi often claimed to be the world's richest man and at times spent up to $250,000 a day to support his lifestyle. He started experiencing cash flow problems in the early 1980s, however, and towards the end of the decade the debt bubble burst. First to go was his private DC-8. The jet was grounded in 1986 when he defaulted on a $15 million loan. Following that, he defaulted on a $50 million loan issued by a Swiss bank and guaranteed by the Sultan of Brunei. The loan had been used to finance the construction of the Nabila .

The Sultan settled the loan himself, seized control of the Nabila and promptly put the yacht on the market. A handful of potential buyers took interest – one of whom was a New York real estate developer named Donald Trump.

The Nabila also took its toll on Benetti. The shipyard had seriously undervalued the costs of constructing the yacht and was hit hard by a series of penalty clauses added to the contract by Khashoggi's negotiators. The contract was overtly biased in Khashoggi's favor, and even allowed him to request changes during the final construction stages. Ultimately the yacht was built at a loss, and by 1985 Benetti was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

A young Italian named Paolo Vitelli stepped in. Sixteen years earlier Paolo had founded Azimut Yachts and built the company into a global brand. In a bid to rescue Benetti and take control of their Viagreggio shipyards, he invested every cent he had to bail out the ailing giant. It was a huge risk, but one that paid off. The new company became known as the Azimut Benetti Group and the rest, as they say, is history.

On the subject of history, remember Sean Connery's role in the James Bond movie, Never Say Never again ? The Nabila yacht is shown at bottom right.

The Trump Princess

The Sultan of Brunei's broker put the Nabila up for sale in 1987 with an asking price of $50 million. Donald Trump offered $15 million, the broker dropped to 32, Trump countered with 28, they settled on 30. A further million was taken off when Trump agreed not to keep the name Nabila and rename the yacht as he saw fit. Until this deal took place, the highest price paid for a secondhand yacht was $16 million.

Trump had actually had his eyes on the Nabila for quite a while. He'd been expanding his casino empire in Atlantic City and realized the Nabila could function both as a business tool and tourist attraction.

While I was building Farley Marina I was trying to get the boat because I knew she would blow everybody's mind.

Donald Trump

Trump renamed the yacht Trump Princess and spent $8.5 million having her refitted. The hull was repainted, the engines rebuilt and more than 3500 yards of chamois leather stripped out and replaced. As a finishing touch, the letter H on the helipad was swapped for a T. When done, the yacht set sail for America and cruised into New York on July 4 1988.

In April 1990 Trump opened his third gambling resort in Atlantic City, the $1 billion Taj Mahal. It was New Jersey's tallest building and the world's largest casino. But to survive it needed to take more than $1 million per day just to service its loans, and the market simply wasn't there. Trump's lenders intervened. They insisted he restructure his organization and sell the Trump Princess . Once again, Adnan Khashoggi's superyacht was up for sale.

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal

Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bought the yacht in 1991 for $19 million. One of the world's richest men, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is founder, CEO and majority stock owner of the Kingdom Holding Company, a company with global interests that include financial services, media, agriculture and real estate. After taking possession of the Trump Princess , Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal renamed the yacht Kingdom 5KR , where 5 represents his lucky number and the letters K and R are the initials of his children. Since the acquisition, Kingdom 5KR is almost permanently berthed at Antibes in the south of France, though from time to time she ventures out to nearby Cannes and Monte Carlo.

The Kingdom 5KR is shown below. The exhaust funnels have been a distinctive feature of this yacht ever since she was launched. They are angled outwards to accommodate the helicopter.

Pinnacle Marine New Zealand

Pinnacle Marine has years of practical experience dealing with luxury yachts and is supported by a network of contacts throughout the industry. If you would like more information about the Azimut Benetti Group, or anything else connected with luxury yachts, please get in touch.

Buettner, Russ; Bagli, Charles V. (2016), How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions , New York Times

Kessler, Ronald (1986), The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi , Hachette Book Group , ISBN: 978-1-5387-6254-7

Rempel, William C. (1987), Latest Financial Setback for Billionaire Saudi Arms Dealer: Sultan of Brunei Seizes Khashoggi Yacht , LA Times

Taylor, John (1988), Trump's Newest Toy , New York Magazine , 20-26, ISSN: 0028-7369

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Kingdom 5KR

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KINGDOM 5KR yacht NOT for charter*

86m  /  282'2 | benetti | 1980 / 1993.

Owner & Guests

• Previous Yacht

Special Features:

• Impressive 9,789nm range
• Eleven cabins
• Lloyds Register classification
• Spa facilities
• Up to 31 crew

The 86m/282'2" motor yacht 'Kingdom 5KR' (ex. Nabila) was built by Benetti in Italy at their Viareggio shipyard. Her interior is styled by design house LUIGI STURCHIO and she was completed in 1980. This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of Bannenberg & Rowell and she was last refitted in 1993.

Guest Accommodation

Kingdom 5KR has been designed to comfortably accommodate up to 22 guests in 11 suites. She is also capable of carrying up to 31 crew onboard to ensure a relaxed luxury yacht experience.

Onboard Comfort & Entertainment

Her features include a spa, gym and air conditioning.

Range & Performance

Kingdom 5KR is built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, with teak decks. Kingdom 5KR comfortably cruises at 17 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 20 knots with a range of up to 9,789 nautical miles from her 615,000 litre fuel tanks at 17 knots. Her water tanks store around 181,000 Litres of fresh water. She was built to Lloyds Register classification society rules.

*Charter Kingdom 5KR Motor Yacht

Motor yacht Kingdom 5KR is currently not believed to be available for private Charter. To view similar yachts for charter , or contact your Yacht Charter Broker for information about renting a luxury charter yacht.

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'Yacht Charter Fleet' is a free information service, if your yacht is available for charter please contact us with details and photos and we will update our records.

Kingdom 5KR Photos

NOTE to U.S. Customs & Border Protection

Specification

M/Y Kingdom 5KR

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• KINGDOM 5KR

If you have any questions about the KINGDOM 5KR information page below please contact us .

A General Description of Motor Yacht KINGDOM 5KR

This motor yacht KINGDOM 5KR is a 86 m 282 (foot) considerable steel vessel which was produced from the keel up at Benetti Yachts and conceived from the design board of Fratelli Benetti and Bannenberg Designs Ltd. Sleeping 22 passengers and 31 qualified crew, motor yacht KINGDOM 5KR was formerly named Fb 116; Kingdom; Trump Princess; Nabila;. The naval architect who actualised this yacht's design in respect of this ship is Fratelli Benetti and Bannenberg Designs Ltd. Her interior designing is from the company Luigi Sturchio.

Motor Yacht KINGDOM 5KR is a beautiful 1980 Classic Yacht owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (also known as Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud), nephew of Saudi Arabia’s late King Fahd. First owned and built for a Saudi billionaire, Adnan Khashoggi under the name NABILA, the yacht was sold to the Sultan of Brunei in 1988 who then sold her to Donald Trump who renamed her TRUMP PRINCESS after refitting her. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought the yacht in 1991 and renamed her KINGDOM 5KR after his investment company Kingdom Holdings, his lucky number 5 and this childrens initials K and R. As NABILA, she featured in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again.

The Building & Naval Architecture of Luxury Yacht KINGDOM 5KR

Fratelli Benetti was the naval architect firm involved in the professional superyacht composition for KINGDOM 5KR. Her interior design was conceived by Luigi Sturchio. Fratelli Benetti and Bannenberg Designs Ltd is also associated with the yacht general design work for this boat. Italy is the country that Benetti Yachts built their new build motor yacht in. After official launch in 1980 in Viareggio she was passed over to the happy owner having completed final finishing. Her hull was constructed with steel. The motor yacht superstructure is fabricated for the most part with aluminium. With a beam of 13.23 metres / 43.4 ft KINGDOM 5KR has beamy internal space. She has a deep draught of 4.69m (15.4ft). She had refit maintenance and changes undertaken in 1993.

Performance And Engineering Package On M/Y KINGDOM 5KR:

Fitted with twin NOHAB-POLAR diesel engines, KINGDOM 5KR can attain a maximum speed of 20 knots. Connected to her Nohab-Polar engine(s) are twin screw propellers. She also has an economical range of 8500 miles whilst motoring at her cruise speed of 17 knots. Her total HP is 6000 HP and her total Kilowatts are 4474. As for bow thruster maneuverability she was fitted with X3 / Stern X1. With respect to the ship’s stabalisers she was built with Vosper.

Guest Accommodation Provided by Superyacht KINGDOM 5KR:

The considerable luxury yacht motor yacht KINGDOM 5KR is able to accommodate up to 22 passengers in addition to 31 qualified crew.

A List of the Specifications of the KINGDOM 5KR:

Miscellaneous Yacht Details

Her deck material is predominantly a teak deck.

KINGDOM 5KR Disclaimer:

The luxury yacht KINGDOM 5KR displayed on this page is merely informational and she is not necessarily available for yacht charter or for sale, nor is she represented or marketed in anyway by CharterWorld. This web page and the superyacht information contained herein is not contractual. All yacht specifications and informations are displayed in good faith but CharterWorld does not warrant or assume any legal liability or responsibility for the current accuracy, completeness, validity, or usefulness of any superyacht information and/or images displayed. All boat information is subject to change without prior notice and may not be current.

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Adnan khashoggi and the 86m superyacht that nearly broke a shipyard.

November 24, 2022

Famed for his lavish lifestyle that garnered him a reputation as the “richest man in the world” during the 1980s, Adnan Khashoggi pushed decadence to new levels with the build of 86 metre  Nabila .   Sophia Wilson  discovers how the flamboyant Saudi arms trader shaped superyacht history

“People thought of Adnan Khashoggi as the richest man in the world because of his lifestyle but in reality, it was all smoke and mirrors,” says Jonathan Beckett, chief executive of  Burgess . “He was a charming man and that is how he got to where he was in life. He charmed everybody, be it Elizabeth Taylor or whoever.”

Adnan Khashoggi in 1992

Born in Mecca, Khashoggi was the eldest son of the personal physician to King Ibn Saud, and he made his “billions” by being involved in some of the biggest arms deals of the 20th century. He is rumoured to have first noticed the financial benefits of facilitating connections while at boarding school in Egypt. The story goes that he introduced two of his classmates’ fathers – an Egyptian who made towels and sheets and a Libyan who was in the market for those items – and took a healthy commission.

His personal wealth began to amass quickly in the 1970s when, after the Arab- Israeli war, Saudi Arabia and other states began an extensive armament programme. Khashoggi became the middleman between America and Saudi Arabia for these arms purchases and was not shy about displaying his wealth. In New York he knocked together 16 apartments to make one grand residence, he owned three lavishly refitted commercial-size jets, and in the late 1970s he decided he needed a superyacht to add to his portfolio.

Having bought his first yacht when he was just 18, he would not be content with just any superyacht – he wanted to build the largest yacht in the world. He turned to Italian yard  Benetti  to make his 86-metre vision a reality and employed the services of the late, legendary designer  Jon Bannenberg . “I think he naturally gravitated towards [Jon] because he was absolutely at the top of his game at the time,” recalls Jon’s son Dickie Bannenberg, who was a teenager during the build. “I don’t know the exact circumstances in which they met but I do remember my dad talking about lots of trips to see clients in the Middle East in general. He used to have to be prepared to wait around for hours, sitting in a Mercedes with the air con running until he was suddenly summoned at 11 o’clock at night.”

The result of Bannenberg’s design was not only the largest private yacht in the world, but also one of the most distinctive. With five decks incorporating 11 suites (each named after a precious jewel) and a helipad,  Nabila   featured modern lines that were complemented by her futuristic silver hull. “The yacht was so different at the time, like so many of my dad’s projects, but that one especially so. With the silver hull, the white paintwork and those distinctive angled air funnels and air exhausts, she was very prominent for a long time,” says Dickie.

Nabila splashed at Benetti in 1979

For the interiors, Khashoggi turned to Italian designers Luigi Sturchio and it was here that his ambitions were truly allowed to run wild. The yacht was swathed in gold and diamonds, with added touches including chinchilla bedspreads, an enormous bathtub carved out of a huge piece of marble with gold taps (naturally), and a crystal-covered piano that was reportedly gifted to Khashoggi’s wife by Liberace. Khashoggi also wanted the yacht to be completely self-sufficient so included additions such as a three-chair hair salon and a hospital with an operating theatre.

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Jeff Bezos or Larry Elisson’s superyachts do not even come close to this ill-fated Saudi businessman’s luxurious superyacht. Swathed in gold and diamonds, Nabila had 100 rooms, space for 400 guests, a hospital, and a mammoth bedroom with a secret compartment.

Nabila: Novel, Nonpareil, and Noteworthy-

The Italian shipyard Benetti was tasked with bringing the 282-foot luxury vessel to life. Thanks to the legendary designer Jon Bannenberg, Nabila was not only glorious and ahead of its time but also incredibly self-sufficient, boasting amenities like a three-chair hair salon and even a hospital with an operating theater. According to New York magazine, this pleasure craft, with its 11 suites named after precious gems, was packed with every luxury money could buy.

Nabila was as powerful as it was pretty, cruising at 17.5 knots and capable of crossing the Atlantic twice without refueling. The mammoth vessel boasted fourteen diesel tanks, holding a total of 136,000 imperial gallons of fuel, allowing it to travel a cool 8,500 miles

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The Haves and the Have-Yachts

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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Benetti Yachts

One of Europe’s oldest luxury yacht builders, Benetti’s varied portfolio includes semi-custom and custom luxury yachts and superyachts constructed in FRP, aluminium and steel. As a member of the Azimut|Benetti Group, Benetti is a world leader in terms of the total length and units of yachts over 37 metres it has in its order book at any given time.

History of Benetti

In 1873, Lorenzo Benetti founded the shipyard near the shipbuilding centre of Viareggio, Italy. After Lorenzo’s death in 1927, it passed to his sons, Gino and Emilio, who renamed the shipyard Fratelli Benetti, or Brothers Benetti, and their four sons soon joined the family business.  The primary focus was on building commercial sailing vessels and navy ships until the 1950s when the company split the business between commercial and leisure vessels. The leisure yacht business, led by great-grandson Lorenzo, took off in the 1960s when Fratelli Benetti began to design and construct yachts in steel with wood-panelled luxury interiors called the Delfino model.

The Tirreno and Mediterraneo models followed, the latter lifting Benetti beyond the 30-metre mark. By 1980, Benetti had become the world’s most active builder of yachts of 24 metres or more, receiving worldwide attention for delivering the staggeringly large for its time Nabila (now Kingdom 5KR) to Adnan Khashoggi in 1979 at a steep loss. The ruthless contract for this project eventually forced the yard into bankruptcy in 1984.

The Turin-based fibreglass boatbuilding company Azimut was the successful bidder for the Benetti assets the following year. Azimut’s owner, Paolo Vitelli, provided the historic company with the technical and financial support to expand its operations. Today, Benetti operates two shipyards, located in Viareggio and Livorno, Italy. Originally concentrating on metal boats in the 40 to 50 metre range, Benetti branched out to include several models of composite displacement motor yachts to fill the gap between large Azimuts and small Benettis, as well as develop much larger yachts in steel and aluminium. In 2020, the builder delivered three yachts of more than 100 metres. The Azimut|Benetti Group is the world’s largest superyacht builder by total length of yachts under construction in BOAT International’s Global Order Book and has been since 1999. It remains a family-owned company with Vitelli’s daughter, Giovanna, acting as Group Vice-President

The company’s fleet counts five categories: CLASS, B.YOND, OASIS, B.NOW, CUSTOM. In the CLASS category, there are two composite displacement models: Motopanfilo 37M and Diamond 44M. Motopanfilo 37M draws inspiration from the past and projects it into the future. Powerfully inspired by the nautical tradition of the 60s, with modern technical and stylistic solutions, Motopanfilo 37M has a modern twist where artful use of mirrors expands the perception of interior space and amplifies the sea views. Loro Piana Interiors has fitted out the interiors and part of the exteriors. Diamond 44M is the fibreglass flagship of the Benetti Class category, with a perfect balance between harmonious exterior proportions and outdoor spaces. It boasts a 102 sqm Sun Deck - the largest on the market for this size - and a sophisticated ventilation system, which ensures fresh and clean air throughout the yacht.

B.Yond 37M is a yacht with steel hull and aluminium superstructure that promises reduced environmental impact for improved comfort during navigation with the hybrid propulsion E-Mode system developed by Siemens for the shipyard. Oasis Deck®, developed by Benetti and British firm RWD back in 2019 is based on a mix of five exclusive characteristics: the opening wings that extend the deck close to the water but safe from the waves, a magnificent pool integrated in a flush deck, an unobstructed 270-degree view, a mixture of sun and shade and a social design that weaves the entire deck into a vast convivial OASIS. This new solution is dedicated to all the yacht owners who want to spend quality time on board, in constant contact with the surrounding environment. The new solution is offered by the shipyard on Oasis 34M, Oasis 40M and on the B.Now category. The four models in the B.NOW category, 50M, 58M, 66M and 72 M, are all, in fact, also offered with the Oasis Deck® solution and are once again the joint efforts by the shipyard and RWD. The B.NOW models are suited to people who love the life at sea in a casual and contemporary atmosphere, without sacrificing comfort and privacy. Finally, the CUSTOM category features yachts from 48 to over 100 meters in length, tailor made to the owner’s desires.

The Group has extensive in-house design and styling services and also owns the Lusben yard for repair and refits.

Notable Benetti Yachts

Mention Benetti and the first name that comes to mind is Nabila built for Saudi Arabian billionaire Adnan Kashoggi in 1980. At 85.65 metres, Nabila was the largest superyacht in the world at the time, featuring an exterior design by Jon Bannenburg. The yacht’s fame grew with her role in the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again”, as the Disco Volante . The yacht next belonged to Donald Trump, who named her Trump Princess. Her name since 1991 is Kingdom 5KR and she is owned by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

The first post-Fratelli Benetti was 45-metre Rima (now Ego) designed by Terence Disdale in 1987, followed by Sea Sedan (now Tumberry C) , Shamwari (now Mistress) , Joalmi and Sahab III . Although it would build any custom contract, Benetti updated its own semi-custom line with the award-winning, full-displacement 50-metre Golden Bay series in 1995. This series was optimized for charter and introduced many people to the Italian brand. The last one launched was Jo in 2004.

The seven-deck, 70-metre Freedom (ex- Reverie ) was launched in 2000 and at the time of her build was the largest Benetti by volume at 1,979GT

Serial superyacht owner John Staluppi has built two custom Benettis, the 60.95m Diamonds Are Forever launched in 2011 and the World Superyacht Award winner 69.3m Spectre in 2019. He also owned a 2001 Benetti he named Quantum of Solace (now Elysium) .

In 2015 Sir Philip Green took delivery of his third Benetti, the 90m Lionheart , which was the longest Benetti to date. His wife’s design studio Green & Mingarelli, designed the lavish interior.

The champ among Benetti’s repeat owners is the Chinese owner of a string of Ambrosias, Ambrous Young. The latest one, Ambrosia III , which he refitted in 2017 is a 65m launched in 2006. This yacht is notable for being equipped with the radical for its time Azipod propulsion system.

The year 2020 saw the completion of Benetti’s first yachts that broke the 100-metre barrier: the 107m Luminosity , 107m Lana and 108m IJE .

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Motor yachts from SIRENA MARINE shipyard (Turkey) are designed for long journeys, so all SIRENA shipyard models are properly equipped and certified for unrestricted cruising areas. Only top players in the global yacht industry participate in the creation of SIRENA yachts, such as design studios Cor D.Rover (Netherlands) and Tommaso Spadolini (Italy), as well as the team of architects from Frers Naval Architecture & Engineering (Argentina/France). The hull design is handled by Wolfson Unit (England, University of Southampton). As a result of meticulous calculations by an experienced team of English engineers, SIRENA yachts are distinguished by superbly calculated hydrodynamics, which, in combination with a vertical bow, allows for high speeds with significant fuel efficiency. Perfect balance of form and content!

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Since 1954, Acronym of Organizzazione Tigullio Assistenza Motoscafi is one of the first Maintenance Yard in Liguria. The High quality and the professionalism has allowed OTAM to stands out very fast becoming the first authorized Riva yacht Service Center for the Med Sea. Distinguished by the application of traditional methods and a rare and careful selection of materials ensuring outstanding quality craftsmanship and unusual performances. OTAM than develops the first building site bringing to life fifteen wooden Custom Projects with triple planking which are still floating today. In the 80’s OTAM fits around 25 yachts for an American builder before to start his own Production of OTAM 45’ and 55’ with a significant response. Today OTAM has produced around 90 Fast and Iconic Performance Yachts becoming the Italian Specialist and together with the CUSTOM RANGE offers today a limitless choice between 45’ and 130’. The present OTAM products portfolio is the result of over 65 years of specialization. N°2 product lines today, Fast&Iconic and Otam Custom Range. The OTAM 45’, 58’ Open or HT, the all new 70’HT, the 80’HT together with the OTAM 85’ GTS are Fast&Iconic line. In 2014 OTAM CUSTOM RANGE starts the production of full custom aluminium superyachts ranging from 100’ to 130’. The OTAM CUSTOM RANGE offers unique flexibility together with superior standards and a dedicated environment where to design, develop and build your full Custom Project. Do not just buy it but build it, Unique.

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