Jeff Bezos’ superyacht is so big it needs its own yacht

“The monstrosity going to Captain Bezos: a 417-foot superyacht that’s so massive it has its own ‘support yacht’ with a helipad, according to Bloomberg. The estimated cost, not including the boat’s support boat, is $500 million.”

16 thoughts on “Jeff Bezos’ superyacht is so big it needs its own yacht

  1. But god forbid, let’s not tax the mega-wealthy lest Western Civilization collapse and Lenin, Marx, and Engels rise zombie-like from their graves.

    Because a guy buying a $500 million yacht totally makes sense when the majority of the citizenry is one healthcare crisis away from bankruptcy, a generation faces crippling school loan debt, and the middle class (the *real* engine of the economy) is being shrunken and squeezed year-by-year.

  2. And the Trumpblicans are fighting Biden’s plan to raise taxes on the rich to less than half the rate when Eisenhower was president.

    1. My experience of Eisenhower is limited to being a little kid and seeing Cronkite (or maybe Mudd) say he had died. But I’ve got to say, from here it looks like he was well to the left of Obama:
      rich paying something like their fair share
      literal, actual antifa
      backed a big public works plan and made it happen
      leery of the M.I.C.

      1. To me, President Ike is a guy that seems to get better as time goes on and we have the perspective to appreciate his wisdom, honor and common sense.

        And I hear he also did pretty well as a general.

        As time goes on from my high school years, Ike, the subject of liberal scorn at the time, just seems to get ever bigger in my imagination, while guys I used to think were big men, like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, seem to shrink constantly.

        I guess maybe our history lessons might be skewed. They might at least have mentioned in passing that Jackson was a total ogre, that Wilson was a virulent racist, and that Custer was actually the bad guy in that whole Big Horn thingy.

        On the other hand, I haven’t forgotten that Ike could have done way more for civil rights, and should have condemned McCarthyism with as much passion as he could muster, so I try to keep my perspective balanced.

        1. Eisenhower is the best case of a C+ President for me (which is pretty good given most American Presidents) I rank him #8 of the 20 ‘modern Presidents’ starting with Theodore Roosevelt who referred to himself as the first modern President.

          The reason for this is that for every positive there is an offsetting negative.

          On the one side, he helped modernize the United States through the highway system, on the other side he did the minimum possible advancing Civil Rights. (I admit putting these two things together is a bit of a stretch.)

          That was not an oversight from him either. He genuinely believed it was not the job of government to address the problem (not unlike Goldwater) and he publicly spoke out against the Warren Supreme Court for making him have to deal with the issue.

          On the one side, he was the regarded as the ‘father of the nation’ and his advisors told him to look at himself as President as the new George Washington, the wise man in turbulent times of the Cold War coming out of previous turbulent times of World War II and the Great Depression, on the other hand, he did not use this ‘bully pulpit’ (another term invented by Theodore Roosevelt) to either address Civil Rights or to take on McCarthy publicly.

          However, Eisenhower argued in regards to McCarthy that he worked behind the scenes to neuter McCarthy as much as possible and to help bring him down.

          He was a ‘Monetarist’ before the term existed and did not deficit spend to ‘juice’ the economy even though economic growth in the U.S in the 1950s was actually surprisingly slow. On the other hand, he was so obsessed with balanced budgets, that he refused to deficit spend even during the recession of 1959/1960 (which may have caused Nixon to lose to Kennedy.)

          He had a sophisticated understanding of foreign policy and successfully dealt with the Suez Canal crisis, but he also appointed the psychopathic Dulles Brothers as Secretary of State and as CIA Director. I don’t think the full extent of what those two pure evil individuals got up to is even now completely known. In addition to the one Dulles Brother overthrowing (more or less) democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, the other Dulles Brother was very likely directly involved in the start of MK-Ultra.

          The other parallel between Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower is that while Roosevelt claimed to be the first Modern President, Eisenhower had the first modern Presidency in that he he reorganized the structure of the White House by bringing in a Chief of Staff.

          The problem with the liberal scorn of Eisenhower isn’t that there wasn’t a great deal that he did to be critical of, it’s that they were misdirected in claiming that he either wasn’t very intelligent or that he was out of touch with the going on of his own government.

    2. They’re more worried about someone getting $600 for nothing, while people like Bezos hoard wealth the size of countries while his workers get paid slave wages. Then expect the protection of the backwards pro-wealthy legal system or to reap the benefits of US infrastructure and labor to keep himself on top for virtually nothing.

      Don’t worry, the local libertarian around here will tell you once again why regulation is holding everyone down, and to give Bezos another gigantic tax break like Trump did. That will solve all the problems, that wealth will trickle down at any time now, just you wait.

      1. I agree with the preceding comments & Rong Li Ming’s earlier. I’ll add a petty point that wages aren’t the only way employees are mistreated & Amazon isn’t the only offender. Not treating employees as fully human is a widespread problem. It’s not the dominant case, I don’t think, but there’s still little that stops it, effectively, when it happens. Police exhibiting their power over whoever they feel like picking on is only one example. It’s a free country is cover for a multitude of sins.

  3. I now really regret selling my house in Wanaka in the Queenstown Lakes district of NZ…

  4. These billionaires are planning for the eventual collapse of civilization by buying off-the-grid properties in New Zealand and other remote places, but then what? Maybe the solar panels, ammo, and whatever will last twenty years, but then there will be no one to fix or replace them, and their money won’t be any value. They’ll be at the mercy of those guarding them against the lean & mean remaining strands of humanity. Would it seem to be more proactive to spend the money now and try to prevent the collapse?

    1. Maybe some of the historians here can tell us whether there’s a methodology to measure relative wealth inequity now versus the times of the French and Russian Revolutions.

      1. Not a historian, but that’s been a hot topic. The answer is clearly yes. Well, yes & no, but mostly yes. Maybe you could refine your question before we start the in-depth answers? Like, maybe you could be specific about your beefs with Piketty, Stiglitz, Milanovich & a whole lot of young economists working in the “equitable growth” arena? Some of whom have jobs in the white house these days?

        1. fwald, to the extent that I can parse MikeP’s post, I think he means that there already are economists doing what you suggest, i.e., examining the present extreme disparity in incomes. He then assumes that you know who they are (Piketty, Stiglitz, and Milanovich, among others), and that the reason you are asking your question is that you have a “beef” with them.

          Off the top of my head, I have the vague idea that Piketty is French and wrote a book on economics that attracted a lot of attention, at least on the Left. Stiglitz might be part of the “Austrian School”, of which I can remember nothing. Otherwise I would have guessed he was a painter or a sculptor. Milanovich rings no bells at all with me. I think MikeP may be mistaken to think that these people and the ideas they have are common knowledge, but perhaps I am just particularly ignorant.

          1. I think Stiglitz was that guy from “Inglorious Basterds”.

            Anyway, the question I was asking was whether there was someway to compare wealth distribution from different eras and different countries such as the French and Russian Revolutions to see if there’s a hypothetical tipping point at which such events become more likely.

            If Stiglitz and Aldo Raine and Bridget von Hammersmark are doing that type of research then I’d be nice if someone could summarize that for my lazy ass. Barring that, I’ll take a link to a good reference.

          2. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Joseph Stiglitz though he hasn’t been as high profile in the last 20 years or so.

            He is a Nobel Prize winning economist who did significant academic research at the same time as he’s also been a public sector economist who worked for the Clinton Administration.

            Although Stiglitz worked for and remained with the Clinton Administration directly as a senior economic advisor or indirectly at the World Bank (he quit the World Bank with one month left in his term), unlike Robert Reich who quit as Labor Secretary with harsh criticism of Clinton Administration policies right after Clinton was reelected, Stiglitz was also very critical of Clinton Administration policies.

            There were a couple major economic crisis in ‘3rd world nations’ brought on by currency speculation collapse during Clinton’s term and the IMF and World Bank insisted their assistance to these badly affected nations be a ‘one size fits all’ austerity policy. Stiglitz publicly questioned President Clinton why his Administration supported these, what amounted to Republican policies, in other nations, when Democrats like Clinton argued they were bad policies in the United States.

            The World Bank and the IMF have since, publicly at least, moved off of this ‘one size fits all’ austerity policy.

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