It sounds like a punchline: Jeff Bezos is so rich that his yacht has a yacht. Except, as Bloomberg reports, it's true. Bezos is having a boat built that will be among the biggest sailing yachts on the seas—417 feet long, multiple decks, three masts, etc. Alas, there's no helipad, and Bezos' girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, is a helicopter pilot. Solution: The superyacht will have its own "support yacht," and the latter ship will have a helipad. All in all, the superyacht known as the Y721, now under construction in the Netherlands, will cost about $500 million. Bezos, however, has a net worth of nearly $180 billion, according to Forbes. The Bloomberg story notes that the superyacht industry is booming as the uber-rich race to build floating mansions amid the pandemic.
But it's the Bezos details in particular that were causing head-turns. It's "another extremely compelling reason to tax the rich," writes Marie Solis at Jezebel. She notes that the wealth of billionaires increased by 54% from March 2020 to March 2021, even as ordinary folks were struggling to pay their rent. Mediaite points out that the price of the superyacht is about twice what Bezos paid for the Washington Post in 2013. Business Insider adds that Bezos has not previously owned his own yacht before, but he apparently got hooked on the lifestyle while sailing on yachts owned by the likes of David Geffen and Diane von Furstenberg. Meanwhile, Judd Legum of the Popular Information newsletter wonders, "I've never been on a fancy boat before but do you have 10x more fun on a $500 million boat than, say, a $50 million boat?" (More Jeff Bezos stories.)
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