Jeff Bezos and the secretive world of super

There’s no official definition of a superyacht (versus a regular yacht), but in the industry the term generally refers to a yacht that is over 74ft long.

Some dispute that definition, saying the term superyachts applies to ships over 200ft long. Some brokers have even taken to the term “gigayacht” to refer to ships longer than 300ft.

“It’s all a little bit of marketing,” says Bill Springer, who writes about the yachting industry for Forbes magazine.

Bezos’ yacht, coming in at over 400ft, is almost as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza (if the vessel was laid out vertically). It’s just under half as long as the Eiffel Tower.

Only a few jumbo superyachts like the Bezos vessel are completed each year, but high-profile projects are often done with such secrecy that builders are required to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Therefore it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know if Bezos copied the decorative flairs of Russian oligarch and fellow yachtsman Andrey Melnichenko by covering the wall of one room in tanned stingray skins.

The industry has been growing rapidly over the past 20 years.

According to the US National Marine Manufacturers Association, boat sales reached a 13-year high in 2020, reflecting how people were turning to the water for safe, socially distanced activities during lockdowns.

“The market’s been absolutely roaring,” says Sam Tucker, head of superyacht research at market intelligence firm VesselsValue. “There’s been a record number of transactions done, and that trend is being sustained even until now.”

The market for used yachts has also “just been nuts”, he says. “The market is just red hot.”

According to Tucker, there are 9,357 yachts over 65ft long that are currently on the seas – meaning those that have not sunk or that are being maintained on land.

About 85% of those are motorised and 15% are sailing yachts like the one Bezos has ordered.

Fewer yachts were chartered in 2020, Tucker says, which he attributes to pandemic travel restrictions preventing normal tourism activities.

Sales dropped for a few weeks as lockdown orders hit the US last year, but then immediately skyrocketed.

In June “it was like someone flipped a switch” as orders started rapidly coming in, says Bob Denison, who’s been a yacht broker in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, since 2001.

“There’s been nothing like it before,” he says. “The amount of demand is two or threefold more than I’ve ever seen.”

Denison’s company sold 1,008 vessels in 2020 – a 35% uptake from the previous year. He is currently on track to see another 30% increase in 2021.

About 65 of those he sold in 2020 were superyachts. So far this year about 40 superyachts have been sold, meaning about 2.2 superyachts have been sold by his company per week since January.

Demand has totally outstripped supply, says his colleague Ben Farnborough, who adds that it’s getting much harder now to find used boats for them to sell.

Farnborough hopes that the easing of coronavirus travel restrictions will soon make it possible to travel to Europe to source more second-hand yachts to sell in the US.

The vessels are often bought by corporations and are then rented out by the company’s owner, making it difficult to say for certain which yachts are owned by whom.

At famous ship-building ports, such as the one in the Netherlands where Oceanco is located, hobbyists will try to spot private airplane tail numbers in an effort to determine which billionaires have come to visit their future yacht.

Privacy is the whole point of owning a yacht, says Tucker, who calls it an “opaque industry”. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, fellow tech billionaires, are rumoured to have yachts.

“These are very private assets and one of the reasons they’re bought is for privacy,” says Tucker. The privacy also offers security protections, not an insignificant consideration for the richest people in the world.

But despite the booming popularity, the ultra-rich may want to keep their newest toys extra private these days.

After Hollywood billionaire David Geffen posted online about being “isolated” on his yacht in a tropical paradise and hoping everyone else was “staying safe” during the pandemic, he was swiftly trolled by land-dwellers.

“Did David Geffen just give everyone the middle finger?” one Instagram user posted in reaction to Geffen’s not-so-humble brag.

Yachts offer “true exclusivity,” says Springer, who likens them to owning a private island or building a personalised city from scratch.

“Back in the Renaissance, rich patrons would pay – in current money – millions of dollars to build cathedrals,” he says.

“And they were the most beautiful and they had the finest artisans, and they were the most spectacular projects of their day. And it was a lot of ‘Hey I’m really rich and I’m gonna do this really amazing stuff with my money’.”

“So superyachts are very similar in that regard.”

They’re getting more comfortable too, and are going to places beyond the “classic glamour ports” like Monaco, Springer says. People are now taking them to more exotic and farflung locations, such as Antarctica and Papua New Guinea, as owners find that they are more than just status symbols.

The finest superyachts are custom-made, with the global craftsmen addressing every single detail for the tastes of the world’s most rich and elite.

They can take years to build. A yacht as big as Bezos’ probably involved about 400 workers and designers, estimates Farnborough. When completed, it will probably need about 60 people to crew it.

Annual operating costs amount to about 10% of the purchase price, says Tucker from VesselsValue. High oil prices and the potential for further lockdowns could lead to more used yachts hitting the market over the coming years, he estimates.