By BEN R. WILLIAMS
There were two stories I saw in the news last week that lodged themselves in my brain.
The first, “A new billionaire class is supercharging superyachts,” was published by Business Insider.
According to the article, the stock market and the AI industry are creating more and more billionaires, and they all want yachts. But not some regular old poor person yacht; they want superyachts, classified as measuring more than 30 meters in length.
“There was this trajectory where you grew into large yacht ownership through a succession of smaller yachts, and now we see people leapfrogging that,” said Anders Kurten, CEO of Fraser Yachts. “It’s not uncommon today that somebody who’s in their 40s buying their first yacht goes directly to a 50 or 60 meter yacht.”
Way to state the obvious, Anders. Every time I check out the dented and irregular shelf at the grocery store, all I can think is, “When I buy a yacht, I’ll skip one of those 30-meter sucker yachts and go straight to a respectable 50-meter model.”
According to the Business Insider piece, the most expensive superyacht sold this year was the Breakthrough, which sold for $793 million, or roughly the GDP of American Samoa. It measures 119 meters in length, is available to charter for just $4 million per week, and features a tennis court, a helipad, and an infinity pool, among other amenities.
The global ultrawealthy population is expected to increase by 31 percent over the next few years, according to the article, which means an estimated 166,160 people who could soon be in the market for a superyacht.
“They tend to like to affiliate with each other,” Kurten said, referring to the billionaire class. “That certainly creates a little bit of positive pressure for our industry.”
In other yacht-related news, last week, a 21-foot skiff ran out of gas off the coast of Alaska and radioed for help. Thankfully, the crew was rescued by a passing cruise ship.
They were not rescued by the Launchpad, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht, which happened to be much closer than the cruise ship but ignored the skiff’s calls for help. I guess rescuing the lives of the comparatively poor really kills the vibe when you’re trying to polish off a bottle of Macallan 1926 in your infinity pool while watching the aurora borealis.
Maybe this is a Pollyanna-ish thing to say, but I don’t know how anyone could enjoy a superyacht. I know I wouldn’t be able to. I would constantly be thinking about starving children, or homeless veterans, or elderly people barely scraping by on Social Security, and my lobster thermidor would turn to ashes in my mouth.
The level of income inequality in our country is reaching a tipping point. The billionaire class is desperately trying to convince Americans to focus on culture war nonsense — immigrants, trans people, and so forth — to distract us from the fact that we’re in the middle of a class war and we’re losing. They want us to fight amongst ourselves while they buy superyachts and build gilded doomsday bunkers with money they’ve picked from our pockets.
You know all the money that American consumers paid to corporations because of the “liberation day” tariffs? You know how the government is refunding $100 billion of that money to these massive corporations that aren’t going to pass one red cent of it back to their consumers? That’s our money, and a substantial portion of it is going to be spent on superyachts with helipads and tennis courts. In return, we get rising gas prices and inflation at the grocery store.
Throughout the history of our nation, there’s been a push-pull between the rich and powerful and the labor force. The rich and powerful want to have the cheapest labor they can possibly get. On the other hand, the labor force wants to have an existence that isn’t a cruel, unyielding nightmare.
Sure, you can have employees that work for a pittance and are treated like a disposable commodity. The downside is, occasionally those employees will rise up and drag you from your home and beat you to death with axe handles in the street while your family watches in horror.
Generations of elites have learned that the best way to avoid the axe handle outcome is to pay employees a living wage, allow them to unionize, and generally offer them a life that’s decent enough that murdering their employer is less desirable than hanging out at home and watching TV. It’s a proven system.
When I read news stories about booming sales of superyachts to billionaires next to stories of everyday Americans struggling against impossible odds, it’s hard not to think that the billionaire class has forgotten the lessons of previous generations. It’s a lesson they should take to heart. After all, history does have a way of repeating itself.
