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Published: April 18th 2017
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Out our front window, "la baie des anges", the Angels' Bay, and just down the coast Antibes, home to a "superyacht" harbors. A super yacht is one so damned big, you can't believe it doesn't belong to a navy or a shipping line. Whatever the formal definition, they are huge.
Right now, there are two visible super yachts - oops, now three - on the horizon to the south of us and, thanks to the intrusive miracle of the internet, I can tell you they are the Apogee, which was built for a Texas software billionaire, estimated cost $70 million US, and the C-167, a Spanish registered boat whose owner is a secret. There are several sites where you can check the location of cruise ships, but which will also tell you the names of practically every other vessel of any size on the water. The one I went to could even tell me which small sailboat was in front of the big boys!
I am not going to take a break to find out what the third ship is. TMI (too much information). These things are around 200 feet long? Take 12 or so passengers is sybaritic luxury and take anywhere from 12 to 90 crew members to run. Many are available for charter, fully staffed and stocked with comestibles and potables, they can be yours in either the Med in the winter or the Caribbean in the summer, starting at about a quarter million US per week. The Apogee is closer to $350K.
There was an article in Forbes about the Apogee in 2012, and it featured a shot of the owner, 72, posing with his 5th wife, 45. The writer talks about joining the owner at the 22 foot, onyx topped bar in a party room which features disco balls, disco lighting, stripper poles, etc. The owner says he likes to have his friends on board to party with him. Huh. Go figure. The article also notes that the owner is drinking Diet Coke and Kahlua and that the staff have "informal" instructions to cut him off after three, as he is a "former alcoholic." Huh. go figure. Annual upkeep on the yacht is an estimated $7 million.
SMALL POTATOES!!!! You think THIS is a super yacht???????
HA! Comb the straw out of your hair, you hillbilly you, and let's get caught up with the reality of the impossibly rich. This picture is of the Ona, formerly called the Dilbar. It belongs to the richest man in Russia, an Uzbek buddy of Vladimir Putin, named Alisher Usmanov, who owns a huge chunk of Russia's cellular, communications and internet industry, and runs the investment arm of the Russian national gas export monopoly. He ranks, depending on the time of day and the spot price for any number of commodities, somewhere between 30th and 80th on the list of the world's 100 richest people.
He has also recovered from a rough start in life. Now 63, he served 6 years in prison, 1982-88, in Uzbekistan for fraud. His conviction was emphatically overturned by the Uzbeki Supreme court in 2000 which ruled, in essence, that the charges were a trumped up bit of nonsense based on zero credible evidence. Given the state of Soviet era courts, you could see that. Fortunately for him, in the next nine years, he completely turned his life around, studied banking, became one of Putin's buddies, and is now listed as on of the world's greatest philanthropists. Seriously, he gives away record amounts of money.
Mind you, the Times of London is reported to have run a story in 2012 about how he paid an English PR firm to write the entire Wikipedia article on himself. Actually, what's wrong with that? Wikipedia is open source - anyone who disagrees could correct the mistakes. There is, however, a further report that the original story, as of 2015, is no longer available on the Times of London website, nor in its public archives.
Curious, that.
The Ona is a SUPER yacht, at one time the world's largest if measured by volume and not by length. Lengthwise it is only #6 in the world, at a mere 500 or so feet. 500 feet. That makes it HALF the length of the Queen Mary II. Cost, unknown and virtually unguessable. Yacht costs go up exponentially as size grows. If Apogee ran $70 million at 200 feet, this would be closer to 500 million. Also 40 plus crew and a helicopter landing pad. Would you expect anything less from a guy who also owns his own Airbus, a jet which normally holds around 300 or so of us slightly-less-rich types?
In the blog on the Russian Cathedral here in Nice, I talked about the glory created by the riches of the Czars. Those guys were pikers compared to this!! And the Czars fell because they aggravated their own people until revolution was inevitable. The super rich of Putin's Russia seem to have learned that lesson. That lunatic is more popular there than vodka, and more corrupt than, well, anything. And an extraordinary number of of his close friends seem to have a lot of money. And, even more remarkably, an ability to hang on to it.
By the way, the Ona, named after the owner's mother, how sweet, may have been sailing to his private estate in Sardinia. Life's tough at the top.
Top?
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