superyachts magazine

Find anything, super fast.

• Destinations
• Documentaries

The Top 100

A comprehensive and accurate list of the largest luxury yachts set to launch in 2024.

A live list of the Top 100 largest superyachts in the world as it currently stands.

The Top 100 luxury yachts launched in 2023 who defined the last year in large yachting.

Has your yacht ever been in the Top 100? Search any yacht to view its ranking.

Select any year since 1906 to view the ranks of the Top 100 largest yachts at the time.

A selection of the Top 100 largest yachts, available for charter on Superyachts.com.

View a selection of brokerage yachts in the Top 100 on Superyachts.com.

• Destinations & Hotel Guide

superyachtdigest

• NEWSLETTER Sign up!
• MAGAZINE Subscribe!

Tankoa’s S501 series at her debut in the ‘Evo’ version at the MYS 2023

Feadship project 1011 gets ready for sea trials, sirena yachts starts construction of the first 42m superyacht, hydro tec presents its 55m catamaran, inspired by the mediterranean, carbon reduction and environmental impact: feadship delivers 84m yacht obsidian, 75m yacht feadship project 825 ready for her fitting out.

IN THE NEWS /// Superyacht Builders

Rossinavi continues to surprise with its first hybrid yacht with ai..., fondazione sanlorenzo: the immersive experience of sanlorenzo between creativity and innovation, nuvolari lenard after 30 years in designing iconic yachts, the venetian..., in the news /// new builds, admiral 72 by giorgio armani, not yet born but already destined..., codecasa m/y my legacy, inspired by the elegance of bygone eras.

INSTAGRAMMED

Discover the most instagrammed yachts

Discover the TOP100 largest yachts!

YACHTS FOR CHARTER

Explore the fleet

PROJECTS & CONCEPTS

Expv: radical but logical, challenging the very zeitgeist of typical yachts: feadship unveils new concept..., yacht models, ferretti yachts 1000 skydeck is the new version of the brand’s..., sirena yachts’ superyacht range: new details unveils, azimut yachts adds two new models to the grande collection fleet.

Participate in our surveys

Have your say

(under construction)

From the Magazine

Gill schmid design presents the 73m superyacht escapade.

Subscribe to the Magazine

4 Issues / Year

Superyacht Digest issues its Newsletter twice a month or more. Join us and be part of our audience!

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Haves and the Have-Yachts

By Evan Osnos

In the Victorian era, it was said that the length of a man’s boat, in feet, should match his age, in years. The Victorians would have had some questions at the fortieth annual Palm Beach International Boat Show, which convened this March on Florida’s Gold Coast. A typical offering: a two-hundred-and-three-foot superyacht named Sea Owl, selling secondhand for ninety million dollars. The owner, Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund tycoon and Republican donor, was throwing in furniture and accessories, including several auxiliary boats, a Steinway piano, a variety of frescoes, and a security system that requires fingerprint recognition. Nevertheless, Mercer’s package was a modest one; the largest superyachts are more than five hundred feet, on a scale with naval destroyers, and cost six or seven times what he was asking.

For the small, tight-lipped community around the world’s biggest yachts, the Palm Beach show has the promising air of spring training. On the cusp of the summer season, it affords brokers and builders and owners (or attendants from their family offices) a chance to huddle over the latest merchandise and to gather intelligence: Who’s getting in? Who’s getting out? And, most pressingly, who’s ogling a bigger boat?

On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references). For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch. According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”

For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom.

At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting.

If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists.

One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “ COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

And yet the marina in Palm Beach was thrumming with anxiety. Ever since the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, launched his assault on Ukraine, the superyacht world has come under scrutiny. At a port in Spain, a Ukrainian engineer named Taras Ostapchuk, working aboard a ship that he said was owned by a Russian arms dealer, threw open the sea valves and tried to sink it to the bottom of the harbor. Under arrest, he told a judge, “I would do it again.” Then he returned to Ukraine and joined the military. Western allies, in the hope of pressuring Putin to withdraw, have sought to cut off Russian oligarchs from businesses and luxuries abroad. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains,” President Joe Biden declared, in his State of the Union address.

Nobody can say precisely how many of Putin’s associates own superyachts—known to professionals as “white boats”—because the white-boat world is notoriously opaque. Owners tend to hide behind shell companies, registered in obscure tax havens, attended by private bankers and lawyers. But, with unusual alacrity, authorities have used subpoenas and police powers to freeze boats suspected of having links to the Russian élite. In Spain, the government detained a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar yacht associated with Sergei Chemezov, the head of the conglomerate Rostec, whose bond with Putin reaches back to their time as K.G.B. officers in East Germany. (As in many cases, the boat is not registered to Chemezov; the official owner is a shell company connected to his stepdaughter, a teacher whose salary is likely about twenty-two hundred dollars a month.) In Germany, authorities impounded the world’s most voluminous yacht, Dilbar, for its ties to the mining-and-telecom tycoon Alisher Usmanov. And in Italy police have grabbed a veritable armada, including a boat owned by one of Russia’s richest men, Alexei Mordashov, and a colossus suspected of belonging to Putin himself, the four-hundred-and-fifty-nine-foot Scheherazade.

In Palm Beach, the yachting community worried that the same scrutiny might be applied to them. “Say your superyacht is in Asia, and there’s some big conflict where China invades Taiwan,” Denison told me. “China could spin it as ‘Look at these American oligarchs!’ ” He wondered if the seizures of superyachts marked a growing political animus toward the very rich. “Whenever things are economically or politically disruptive,” he said, “it’s hard to justify taking an insane amount of money and just putting it into something that costs a lot to maintain, depreciates, and is only used for having a good time.”

Nobody pretends that a superyacht is a productive place to stash your wealth. In a column this spring headlined “ A SUPERYACHT IS A TERRIBLE ASSET ,” the Financial Times observed, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

Not so long ago, status transactions among the élite were denominated in Old Masters and in the sculptures of the Italian Renaissance. Joseph Duveen, the dominant art dealer of the early twentieth century, kept the oligarchs of his day—Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache, J. P. Morgan—jockeying over Donatellos and Van Dycks. “When you pay high for the priceless,” he liked to say, “you’re getting it cheap.”

Link copied

In the nineteen-fifties, the height of aspirational style was fine French furniture—F.F.F., as it became known in certain precincts of Fifth Avenue and Palm Beach. Before long, more and more money was going airborne. Hugh Hefner, a pioneer in the private-jet era, decked out a plane he called Big Bunny, where he entertained Elvis Presley, Raquel Welch, and James Caan. The oil baron Armand Hammer circled the globe on his Boeing 727, paying bribes and recording evidence on microphones hidden in his cufflinks. But, once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.

In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht, and more than two hundred and ninety-five is a gigayacht. The world contains about fifty-four hundred superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts.

For the moment, a gigayacht is the most expensive item that our species has figured out how to own. In 2019, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin bought a quadruplex on Central Park South for two hundred and forty million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a home in America. In May, an unknown buyer spent about a hundred and ninety-five million on an Andy Warhol silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe. In luxury-yacht terms, those are ordinary numbers. “There are a lot of boats in build well over two hundred and fifty million dollars,” Jamie Edmiston, a broker in Monaco and London, told me. His buyers are getting younger and more inclined to spend long stretches at sea. “High-speed Internet, telephony, modern communications have made working easier,” he said. “Plus, people made a lot more money earlier in life.”

A Silicon Valley C.E.O. told me that one appeal of boats is that they can “absorb the most excess capital.” He explained, “Rationally, it would seem to make sense for people to spend half a billion dollars on their house and then fifty million on the boat that they’re on for two weeks a year, right? But it’s gone the other way. People don’t want to live in a hundred-thousand-square-foot house. Optically, it’s weird. But a half-billion-dollar boat, actually, is quite nice.” Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, is content to spend three or four times as much on his yachts as on his homes. Part of the appeal is flexibility. “If you’re on your boat and you don’t like your neighbor, you tell the captain, ‘Let’s go to a different place,’ ” he said. On land, escaping a bad neighbor requires more work: “You got to try and buy him out or make it uncomfortable or something.” The preference for sea-based investment has altered the proportions of taste. Until recently, the Silicon Valley C.E.O. said, “a fifty-metre boat was considered a good-sized boat. Now that would be a little bit embarrassing.” In the past twenty years, the length of the average luxury yacht has grown by a third, to a hundred and sixty feet.

Thorstein Veblen, the economist who published “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in 1899, argued that the power of “conspicuous consumption” sprang not from artful finery but from sheer needlessness. “In order to be reputable,” he wrote, “it must be wasteful.” In the yachting world, stories circulate about exotic deliveries by helicopter or seaplane: Dom Pérignon, bagels from Zabar’s, sex workers, a rare melon from the island of Hokkaido. The industry excels at selling you things that you didn’t know you needed. When you flip through the yachting press, it’s easy to wonder how you’ve gone this long without a personal submarine, or a cryosauna that “blasts you with cold” down to minus one hundred and ten degrees Celsius, or the full menagerie of “exclusive leathers,” such as eel and stingray.

But these shrines to excess capital exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society—and all but unseen by everyone else. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the yachting community was straining to manage its reputation as a gusher of carbon emissions (one well-stocked diesel yacht is estimated to produce as much greenhouse gas as fifteen hundred passenger cars), not to mention the fact that the world of white boats is overwhelmingly white. In a candid aside to a French documentarian, the American yachtsman Bill Duker said, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.” The Dutch press recently reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was building a sailing yacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam might temporarily dismantle a bridge that had survived the Nazis in order to let the boat pass to the open sea. Rotterdammers were not pleased. On Facebook, a local man urged people to “take a box of rotten eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through.” At least thirteen thousand people expressed interest. Amid the uproar, a deputy mayor announced that the dismantling plan had been abandoned “for the time being.” (Bezos modelled his yacht partly on one owned by his friend Barry Diller, who has hosted him many times. The appreciation eventually extended to personnel, and Bezos hired one of Diller’s captains.)

As social media has heightened the scrutiny of extraordinary wealth, some of the very people who created those platforms have sought less observable places to spend it. But they occasionally indulge in some coded provocation. In 2006, when the venture capitalist Tom Perkins unveiled his boat in Istanbul, most passersby saw it adorned in colorful flags, but people who could read semaphore were able to make out a message: “Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.” As a longtime owner told me, “If you don’t have some guilt about it, you’re a rat.”

Alex Finley, a former C.I.A. officer who has seen yachts proliferate near her home in Barcelona, has weighed the superyacht era and its discontents in writings and on Twitter, using the hashtag #YachtWatch. “To me, the yachts are not just yachts,” she told me. “In Russia’s case, these are the embodiment of oligarchs helping a dictator destabilize our democracy while utilizing our democracy to their benefit.” But, Finley added, it’s a mistake to think the toxic symbolism applies only to Russia. “The yachts tell a whole story about a Faustian capitalism—this idea that we’re ready to sell democracy for short-term profit,” she said. “They’re registered offshore. They use every loophole that we’ve put in place for illicit money and tax havens. So they play a role in this battle, writ large, between autocracy and democracy.”

After a morning on the docks at the Palm Beach show, I headed to a more secluded marina nearby, which had been set aside for what an attendant called “the really big hardware.” It felt less like a trade show than like a boutique resort, with a swimming pool and a terrace restaurant. Kevin Merrigan, a relaxed Californian with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead pinked by the sun, was waiting for me at the stern of Unbridled, a superyacht with a brilliant blue hull that gave it the feel of a personal cruise ship. He invited me to the bridge deck, where a giant screen showed silent video of dolphins at play.

Merrigan is the chairman of the brokerage Northrop & Johnson, which has ridden the tide of growing boats and wealth since 1949. Lounging on a sofa mounded with throw pillows, he projected a nearly postcoital level of contentment. He had recently sold the boat we were on, accepted an offer for a behemoth beside us, and begun negotiating the sale of yet another. “This client owns three big yachts,” he said. “It’s a hobby for him. We’re at a hundred and ninety-one feet now, and last night he said, ‘You know, what do you think about getting a two hundred and fifty?’ ” Merrigan laughed. “And I was, like, ‘Can’t you just have dinner?’ ”

Among yacht owners, there are some unwritten rules of stratification: a Dutch-built boat will hold its value better than an Italian; a custom design will likely get more respect than a “series yacht”; and, if you want to disparage another man’s boat, say that it looks like a wedding cake. But, in the end, nothing says as much about a yacht, or its owner, as the delicate matter of L.O.A.—length over all.

The imperative is not usually length for length’s sake (though the longtime owner told me that at times there is an aspect of “phallic sizing”). “L.O.A.” is a byword for grandeur. In most cases, pleasure yachts are permitted to carry no more than twelve passengers, a rule set by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, which was conceived after the sinking of the Titanic. But those limits do not apply to crew. “So, you might have anything between twelve and fifty crew looking after those twelve guests,” Edmiston, the broker, said. “It’s a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”

As yachts have grown more capacious, and the limits on passengers have not, more and more space on board has been devoted to staff and to novelties. The latest fashions include IMAX theatres, hospital equipment that tests for dozens of pathogens, and ski rooms where guests can suit up for a helicopter trip to a mountaintop. The longtime owner, who had returned the previous day from his yacht, told me, “No one today—except for assholes and ridiculous people—lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat.” After a moment, he added, “Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

Even among the truly rich, there is a gap between the haves and the have-yachts. One boating guest told me about a conversation with a famous friend who keeps one of the world’s largest yachts. “He said, ‘The boat is the last vestige of what real wealth can do.’ What he meant is, You have a chef, and I have a chef. You have a driver, and I have a driver. You can fly privately, and I fly privately. So, the one place where I can make clear to the world that I am in a different fucking category than you is the boat.”

After Merrigan and I took a tour of Unbridled, he led me out to a waiting tender, staffed by a crew member with an earpiece on a coil. The tender, Merrigan said, would ferry me back to the busy main dock of the Palm Beach show. We bounced across the waves under a pristine sky, and pulled into the marina, where my fellow-gawkers were still trying to talk their way past the greeters. As I walked back into the scrum, Namasté was still there, but it looked smaller than I remembered.

For owners and their guests, a white boat provides a discreet marketplace for the exchange of trust, patronage, and validation. To diagram the precise workings of that trade—the customs and anxieties, strategies and slights—I talked to Brendan O’Shannassy, a veteran captain who is a curator of white-boat lore. Raised in Western Australia, O’Shannassy joined the Navy as a young man, and eventually found his way to skippering some of the world’s biggest yachts. He has worked for Paul Allen, the late co-founder of Microsoft, along with a few other billionaires he declines to name. Now in his early fifties, with patient green eyes and tufts of curly brown hair, O’Shannassy has had a vantage from which to monitor the social traffic. “It’s all gracious, and everyone’s kiss-kiss,” he said. “But there’s a lot going on in the background.”

O’Shannassy once worked for an owner who limited the number of newspapers on board, so that he could watch his guests wait and squirm. “It was a mind game amongst the billionaires. There were six couples, and three newspapers,” he said, adding, “They were ranking themselves constantly.” On some boats, O’Shannassy has found himself playing host in the awkward minutes after guests arrive. “A lot of them are savants, but some are very un-socially aware,” he said. “They need someone to be social and charming for them.” Once everyone settles in, O’Shannassy has learned, there is often a subtle shift, when a mogul or a politician or a pop star starts to loosen up in ways that are rarely possible on land. “Your security is relaxed—they’re not on your hip,” he said. “You’re not worried about paparazzi. So you’ve got all this extra space, both mental and physical.”

O’Shannassy has come to see big boats as a space where powerful “solar systems” converge and combine. “It is implicit in every interaction that their sharing of information will benefit both parties; it is an obsession with billionaires to do favours for each other. A referral, an introduction, an insight—it all matters,” he wrote in “Superyacht Captain,” a new memoir. A guest told O’Shannassy that, after a lavish display of hospitality, he finally understood the business case for buying a boat. “One deal secured on board will pay it all back many times over,” the guest said, “and it is pretty hard to say no after your kids have been hosted so well for a week.”

Take the case of David Geffen, the former music and film executive. He is long retired, but he hosts friends (and potential friends) on the four-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot Rising Sun, which has a double-height cinema, a spa and salon, and a staff of fifty-seven. In 2017, shortly after Barack and Michelle Obama departed the White House, they were photographed on Geffen’s boat in French Polynesia, accompanied by Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and Rita Wilson. For Geffen, the boat keeps him connected to the upper echelons of power. There are wealthier Americans, but not many of them have a boat so delectable that it can induce both a Democratic President and the workingman’s crooner to risk the aroma of hypocrisy.

The binding effect pays dividends for guests, too. Once people reach a certain level of fame, they tend to conclude that its greatest advantage is access. Spend a week at sea together, lingering over meals, observing one another floundering on a paddleboard, and you have something of value for years to come. Call to ask for an investment, an introduction, an internship for a wayward nephew, and you’ll at least get the call returned. It’s a mutually reinforcing circle of validation: she’s here, I’m here, we’re here.

But, if you want to get invited back, you are wise to remember your part of the bargain. If you work with movie stars, bring fresh gossip. If you’re on Wall Street, bring an insight or two. Don’t make the transaction obvious, but don’t forget why you’re there. “When I see the guest list,” O’Shannassy wrote, “I am aware, even if not all names are familiar, that all have been chosen for a purpose.”

For O’Shannassy, there is something comforting about the status anxieties of people who have everything. He recalled a visit to the Italian island of Sardinia, where his employer asked him for a tour of the boats nearby. Riding together on a tender, they passed one colossus after another, some twice the size of the owner’s superyacht. Eventually, the man cut the excursion short. “Take me back to my yacht, please,” he said. They motored in silence for a while. “There was a time when my yacht was the most beautiful in the bay,” he said at last. “How do I keep up with this new money?”

The summer season in the Mediterranean cranks up in May, when the really big hardware heads east from Florida and the Caribbean to escape the coming hurricanes, and reconvenes along the coasts of France, Italy, and Spain. At the center is the Principality of Monaco, the sun-washed tax haven that calls itself the “world’s capital of advanced yachting.” In Monaco, which is among the richest countries on earth, superyachts bob in the marina like bath toys.

The nearest hotel room at a price that would not get me fired was an Airbnb over the border with France. But an acquaintance put me on the phone with the Yacht Club de Monaco, a members-only establishment created by the late monarch His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III, whom the Web site describes as “a true visionary in every respect.” The club occasionally rents rooms—“cabins,” as they’re called—to visitors in town on yacht-related matters. Claudia Batthyany, the elegant director of special projects, showed me to my cabin and later explained that the club does not aspire to be a hotel. “We are an association ,” she said. “Otherwise, it becomes”—she gave a gentle wince—“not that exclusive.”

Inside my cabin, I quickly came to understand that I would never be fully satisfied anywhere else again. The space was silent and aromatically upscale, bathed in soft sunlight that swept through a wall of glass overlooking the water. If I was getting a sudden rush of the onboard experience, that was no accident. The clubhouse was designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster to evoke the opulent indulgence of ocean liners of the interwar years, like the Queen Mary. I found a handwritten welcome note, on embossed club stationery, set alongside an orchid and an assemblage of chocolate truffles: “The whole team remains at your entire disposal to make your stay a wonderful experience. Yours sincerely, Service Members.” I saluted the nameless Service Members, toiling for the comfort of their guests. Looking out at the water, I thought, intrusively, of a line from Santiago, Hemingway’s old man of the sea. “Do not think about sin,” he told himself. “It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it.”

I had been assured that the Service Members would cheerfully bring dinner, as they might on board, but I was eager to see more of my surroundings. I consulted the club’s summer dress code. It called for white trousers and a blue blazer, and it discouraged improvisation: “No pocket handkerchief is to be worn above the top breast-pocket bearing the Club’s coat of arms.” The handkerchief rule seemed navigable, but I did not possess white trousers, so I skirted the lobby and took refuge in the bar. At a table behind me, a man with flushed cheeks and a British accent had a head start. “You’re a shitty negotiator,” he told another man, with a laugh. “Maybe sales is not your game.” A few seats away, an American woman was explaining to a foreign friend how to talk with conservatives: “If they say, ‘The earth is flat,’ you say, ‘Well, I’ve sailed around it, so I’m not so sure about that.’ ”

In the morning, I had an appointment for coffee with Gaëlle Tallarida, the managing director of the Monaco Yacht Show, which the Daily Mail has called the “most shamelessly ostentatious display of yachts in the world.” Tallarida was not born to that milieu; she grew up on the French side of the border, swimming at public beaches with a view of boats sailing from the marina. But she had a knack for highly organized spectacle. While getting a business degree, she worked on a student theatre festival and found it thrilling. Afterward, she got a job in corporate events, and in 1998 she was hired at the yacht show as a trainee.

With this year’s show five months off, Tallarida was already getting calls about what she described as “the most complex part of my work”: deciding which owners get the most desirable spots in the marina. “As you can imagine, they’ve got very big egos,” she said. “On top of that, I’m a woman. They are sometimes arriving and saying”—she pointed into the distance, pantomiming a decree—“ ‘O.K., I want that!  ’ ”

Just about everyone wants his superyacht to be viewed from the side, so that its full splendor is visible. Most harbors, however, have a limited number of berths with a side view; in Monaco, there are only twelve, with prime spots arrayed along a concrete dike across from the club. “We reserve the dike for the biggest yachts,” Tallarida said. But try telling that to a man who blew his fortune on a small superyacht.

Whenever possible, Tallarida presents her verdicts as a matter of safety: the layout must insure that “in case of an emergency, any boat can go out.” If owners insist on preferential placement, she encourages a yachting version of the Golden Rule: “What if, next year, I do that to you? Against you?”

Does that work? I asked. She shrugged. “They say, ‘Eh.’ ” Some would gladly risk being a victim next year in order to be a victor now. In the most awful moment of her career, she said, a man who was unhappy with his berth berated her face to face. “I was in the office, feeling like a little girl, with my daddy shouting at me. I said, ‘O.K., O.K., I’m going to give you the spot.’ ”

Securing just the right place, it must be said, carries value. Back at the yacht club, I was on my terrace, enjoying the latest delivery by the Service Members—an airy French omelette and a glass of preternaturally fresh orange juice. I thought guiltily of my wife, at home with our kids, who had sent a text overnight alerting me to a maintenance issue that she described as “a toilet debacle.”

Then I was distracted by the sight of a man on a yacht in the marina below. He was staring up at me. I went back to my brunch, but, when I looked again, there he was—a middle-aged man, on a mid-tier yacht, juiceless, on a greige banquette, staring up at my perfect terrace. A surprising sensation started in my chest and moved outward like a warm glow: the unmistakable pang of superiority.

That afternoon, I made my way to the bar, to meet the yacht club’s general secretary, Bernard d’Alessandri, for a history lesson. The general secretary was up to code: white trousers, blue blazer, club crest over the heart. He has silver hair, black eyebrows, and a tan that evokes high-end leather. “I was a sailing teacher before this,” he said, and gestured toward the marina. “It was not like this. It was a village.”

Before there were yacht clubs, there were jachten , from the Dutch word for “hunt.” In the seventeenth century, wealthy residents of Amsterdam created fast-moving boats to meet incoming cargo ships before they hit port, in order to check out the merchandise. Soon, the Dutch owners were racing one another, and yachting spread across Europe. After a visit to Holland in 1697, Peter the Great returned to Russia with a zeal for pleasure craft, and he later opened Nevsky Flot, one of the world’s first yacht clubs, in St. Petersburg.

For a while, many of the biggest yachts were symbols of state power. In 1863, the viceroy of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, ordered up a steel leviathan called El Mahrousa, which was the world’s longest yacht for a remarkable hundred and nineteen years, until the title was claimed by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt received guests aboard the U.S.S. Potomac, which had a false smokestack containing a hidden elevator, so that the President could move by wheelchair between decks.

But yachts were finding new patrons outside politics. In 1954, the Greek shipping baron Aristotle Onassis bought a Canadian Navy frigate and spent four million dollars turning it into Christina O, which served as his home for months on end—and, at various times, as a home to his companions Maria Callas, Greta Garbo, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Christina O had its flourishes—a Renoir in the master suite, a swimming pool with a mosaic bottom that rose to become a dance floor—but none were more distinctive than the appointments in the bar, which included whales’ teeth carved into pornographic scenes from the Odyssey and stools upholstered in whale foreskins.

For Onassis, the extraordinary investments in Christina O were part of an epic tit for tat with his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, a fellow shipping tycoon, which was so entrenched that it continued even after Onassis’s death, in 1975. Six years later, Niarchos launched a yacht fifty-five feet longer than Christina O: Atlantis II, which featured a swimming pool on a gyroscope so that the water would not slosh in heavy seas. Atlantis II, now moored in Monaco, sat before the general secretary and me as we talked.

Over the years, d’Alessandri had watched waves of new buyers arrive from one industry after another. “First, it was the oil. After, it was the telecommunications. Now, they are making money with crypto,” he said. “And, each time, it’s another size of the boat, another design.” What began as symbols of state power had come to represent more diffuse aristocracies—the fortunes built on carbon, capital, and data that migrated across borders. As early as 1908, the English writer G. K. Chesterton wondered what the big boats foretold of a nation’s fabric. “The poor man really has a stake in the country,” he wrote. “The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

Each iteration of fortune left its imprint on the industry. Sheikhs, who tend to cruise in the world’s hottest places, wanted baroque indoor spaces and were uninterested in sundecks. Silicon Valley favored acres of beige, more Sonoma than Saudi. And buyers from Eastern Europe became so abundant that shipyards perfected the onboard banya , a traditional Russian sauna stocked with birch and eucalyptus. The collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, had minted a generation of new billionaires, whose approach to money inspired a popular Russian joke: One oligarch brags to another, “Look at this new tie. It cost me two hundred bucks!” To which the other replies, “You moron. You could’ve bought the same one for a thousand!”

In 1998, around the time that the Russian economy imploded, the young tycoon Roman Abramovich reportedly bought a secondhand yacht called Sussurro—Italian for “whisper”—which had been so carefully engineered for speed that each individual screw was weighed before installation. Soon, Russians were competing to own the costliest ships. “If the most expensive yacht in the world was small, they would still want it,” Maria Pevchikh, a Russian investigator who helps lead the Anti-Corruption Foundation, told me.

In 2008, a thirty-six-year-old industrialist named Andrey Melnichenko spent some three hundred million dollars on Motor Yacht A, a radical experiment conceived by the French designer Philippe Starck, with a dagger-shaped hull and a bulbous tower topped by a master bedroom set on a turntable that pivots to capture the best view. The shape was ridiculed as “a giant finger pointing at you” and “one of the most hideous vessels ever to sail,” but it marked a new prominence for Russian money at sea. Today, post-Soviet élites are thought to own a fifth of the world’s gigayachts.

Even Putin has signalled his appreciation, being photographed on yachts in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. In an explosive report in 2012, Boris Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Minister, accused Putin of amassing a storehouse of outrageous luxuries, including four yachts, twenty homes, and dozens of private aircraft. Less than three years later, Nemtsov was fatally shot while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin. The Russian government, which officially reports that Putin collects a salary of about a hundred and forty thousand dollars and possesses a modest apartment in Moscow, denied any involvement.

Many of the largest, most flamboyant gigayachts are designed in Monaco, at a sleek waterfront studio occupied by the naval architect Espen Øino. At sixty, Øino has a boyish mop and the mild countenance of a country parson. He grew up in a small town in Norway, the heir to a humble maritime tradition. “My forefathers built wooden rowing boats for four generations,” he told me. In the late eighties, he was designing sailboats when his firm won a commission to design a megayacht for Emilio Azcárraga, the autocratic Mexican who built Televisa into the world’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster. Azcárraga was nicknamed El Tigre, for his streak of white hair and his comfort with confrontation; he kept a chair in his office that was unusually high off the ground, so that visitors’ feet dangled like children’s.

In early meetings, Øino recalled, Azcárraga grew frustrated that the ideas were not dazzling enough. “You must understand,” he said. “I don’t go to port very often with my boats, but, when I do, I want my presence to be felt.”

The final design was suitably arresting; after the boat was completed, Øino had no shortage of commissions. In 1998, he was approached by Paul Allen, of Microsoft, to build a yacht that opened the way for the Goliaths that followed. The result, called Octopus, was so large that it contained a submarine marina in its belly, as well as a helicopter hangar that could be converted into an outdoor performance space. Mick Jagger and Bono played on occasion. I asked Øino why owners obsessed with secrecy seem determined to build the world’s most conspicuous machines. He compared it to a luxury car with tinted windows. “People can’t see you, but you’re still in that expensive, impressive thing,” he said. “We all need to feel that we’re important in one way or another.”

In recent months, Øino has seen some of his creations detained by governments in the sanctions campaign. When we spoke, he condemned the news coverage. “Yacht equals Russian equals evil equals money,” he said disdainfully. “It’s a bit tragic, because the yachts have become synonymous with the bad guys in a James Bond movie.”

What about Scheherazade, the giant yacht that U.S. officials have alleged is held by a Russian businessman for Putin’s use? Øino, who designed the ship, rejected the idea. “We have designed two yachts for heads of state, and I can tell you that they’re completely different, in terms of the layout and everything, from Scheherazade.” He meant that the details said plutocrat, not autocrat.

For the time being, Scheherazade and other Øino creations under detention across Europe have entered a strange legal purgatory. As lawyers for the owners battle to keep the ships from being permanently confiscated, local governments are duty-bound to maintain them until a resolution is reached. In a comment recorded by a hot mike in June, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, marvelled that “people are basically being paid to maintain Russian superyachts on behalf of the United States government.” (It usually costs about ten per cent of a yacht’s construction price to keep it afloat each year. In May, officials in Fiji complained that a detained yacht was costing them more than a hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars a day.)

Stranger still are the Russian yachts on the lam. Among them is Melnichenko’s much maligned Motor Yacht A. On March 9th, Melnichenko was sanctioned by the European Union, and although he denied having close ties to Russia’s leadership, Italy seized one of his yachts—a six-hundred-million-dollar sailboat. But Motor Yacht A slipped away before anyone could grab it. Then the boat turned off the transponder required by international maritime rules, so that its location could no longer be tracked. The last ping was somewhere near the Maldives, before it went dark on the high seas.

The very largest yachts come from Dutch and German shipyards, which have experience in naval vessels, known as “gray boats.” But the majority of superyachts are built in Italy, partly because owners prefer to visit the Mediterranean during construction. (A British designer advises those who are weighing their choices to take the geography seriously, “unless you like schnitzel.”)

In the past twenty-two years, nobody has built more superyachts than the Vitellis, an Italian family whose patriarch, Paolo Vitelli, got his start in the seventies, manufacturing smaller boats near a lake in the mountains. By 1985, their company, Azimut, had grown large enough to buy the Benetti shipyards, which had been building enormous yachts since the nineteenth century. Today, the combined company builds its largest boats near the sea, but the family still works in the hill town of Avigliana, where a medieval monastery towers above a valley. When I visited in April, Giovanna Vitelli, the vice-president and the founder’s daughter, led me through the experience of customizing a yacht.

“We’re using more and more virtual reality,” she said, and a staffer fitted me with a headset. When the screen blinked on, I was inside a 3-D mockup of a yacht that is not yet on the market. I wandered around my suite for a while, checking out swivel chairs, a modish sideboard, blond wood panelling on the walls. It was convincing enough that I collided with a real-life desk.

After we finished with the headset, it was time to pick the décor. The industry encourages an introspective evaluation: What do you want your yacht to say about you? I was handed a vibrant selection of wood, marble, leather, and carpet. The choices felt suddenly grave. Was I cut out for the chiselled look of Cream Vesuvio, or should I accept that I’m a gray Cardoso Stone? For carpets, I liked the idea of Chablis Corn White—Paris and the prairie, together at last. But, for extra seating, was it worth splurging for the V.I.P. Vanity Pouf?

Some designs revolve around a single piece of art. The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” reportedly was hung on the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-foot yacht Serene, after the Louvre rejected a Saudi demand that it hang next to the “Mona Lisa.” Art conservators blanched at the risks that excess humidity and fluctuating temperatures could pose to a five-hundred-year-old painting. Often, collectors who want to display masterpieces at sea commission replicas.

If you’ve just put half a billion dollars into a boat, you may have qualms about the truism that material things bring less happiness than experiences do. But this, too, can be finessed. Andrew Grant Super, a co-founder of the “experiential yachting” firm Berkeley Rand, told me that he served a uniquely overstimulated clientele: “We call them the bored billionaires.” He outlined a few of his experience products. “We can plot half of the Pacific Ocean with coördinates, to map out the Battle of Midway,” he said. “We re-create the full-blown battles of the giant ships from America and Japan. The kids have haptic guns and haptic vests. We put the smell of cordite and cannon fire on board, pumping around them.” For those who aren’t soothed by the scent of cordite, Super offered an alternative. “We fly 3-D-printed, architectural freestanding restaurants into the middle of the Maldives, on a sand shelf that can only last another eight hours before it disappears.”

For some, the thrill lies in the engineering. Staluppi, born in Brooklyn, was an auto mechanic who had no experience with the sea until his boss asked him to soup up a boat. “I took the six-cylinder engines out and put V-8 engines in,” he recalled. Once he started commissioning boats of his own, he built scale models to conduct tests in water tanks. “I knew I could never have the biggest boat in the world, so I says, ‘You know what? I want to build the fastest yacht in the world.’ The Aga Khan had the fastest yacht, and we just blew right by him.”

In Italy, after decking out my notional yacht, I headed south along the coast, to Tuscan shipyards that have evolved with each turn in the country’s history. Close to the Carrara quarries, which yielded the marble that Michelangelo turned into David, ships were constructed in the nineteenth century, to transport giant blocks of stone. Down the coast, the yards in Livorno made warships under the Fascists, until they were bombed by the Allies. Later, they began making and refitting luxury yachts. Inside the front gate of a Benetti shipyard in Livorno, a set of models depicted the firm’s famous modern creations. Most notable was the megayacht Nabila, built in 1980 for the high-living arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, with a hundred rooms and a disco that was the site of legendary decadence. (Khashoggi’s budget for prostitution was so extravagant that a French prosecutor later estimated he paid at least half a million dollars to a single madam in a single year.)

In 1987, shortly before Khashoggi was indicted for mail fraud and obstruction of justice (he was eventually acquitted), the yacht was sold to the real-estate developer Donald Trump, who renamed it Trump Princess. Trump was never comfortable on a boat—“Couldn’t get off fast enough,” he once said—but he liked to impress people with his yacht’s splendor. In 1991, while three billion dollars in debt, Trump ceded the vessel to creditors. Later in life, though, he discovered enthusiastic support among what he called “our beautiful boaters,” and he came to see quality watercraft as a mark of virtue—a way of beating the so-called élite. “We got better houses, apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are,” he told a crowd in Fargo, North Dakota. “Let’s call ourselves, from now on, the super-élite.”

In the age of oversharing, yachts are a final sanctum of secrecy, even for some of the world’s most inveterate talkers. Oprah, after returning from her sojourn with the Obamas, rebuffed questions from reporters. “What happens on the boat stays on the boat,” she said. “We talked, and everybody else did a lot of paddleboarding.”

I interviewed six American superyacht owners at length, and almost all insisted on anonymity or held forth with stupefying blandness. “Great family time,” one said. Another confessed, “It’s really hard to talk about it without being ridiculed.” None needed to be reminded of David Geffen’s misadventure during the early weeks of the pandemic, when he Instagrammed a photo of his yacht in the Grenadines and posted that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe.” It drew thousands of responses, many marked #EatTheRich, others summoning a range of nautical menaces: “At least the pirates have his location now.”

The yachts extend a tradition of seclusion as the ultimate luxury. The Medici, in sixteenth-century Florence, built elevated passageways, or corridoi , high over the city to escape what a scholar called the “clash of classes, the randomness, the smells and confusions” of pedestrian life below. More recently, owners of prized town houses in London have headed in the other direction, building three-story basements so vast that their construction can require mining engineers—a trend that researchers in the United Kingdom named “luxified troglodytism.”

Water conveys a particular autonomy, whether it’s ringing the foot of a castle or separating a private island from the mainland. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, gave startup funding to the Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit group co-founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson, which seeks to create floating mini-states—an endeavor that Thiel considered part of his libertarian project to “escape from politics in all its forms.” Until that fantasy is realized, a white boat can provide a start. A recent feature in Boat International , a glossy trade magazine, noted that the new hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar megayacht Victorious has four generators and “six months’ autonomy” at sea. The builder, Vural Ak, explained, “In case of emergency, god forbid, you can live in open water without going to shore and keep your food stored, make your water from the sea.”

Much of the time, superyachts dwell beyond the reach of ordinary law enforcement. They cruise in international waters, and, when they dock, local cops tend to give them a wide berth; the boats often have private security, and their owners may well be friends with the Prime Minister. According to leaked documents known as the Paradise Papers, handlers proposed that the Saudi crown prince take delivery of a four-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar yacht in “international waters in the western Mediterranean,” where the sale could avoid taxes.

Builders and designers rarely advertise beyond the trade press, and they scrupulously avoid leaks. At Lürssen, a German shipbuilding firm, projects are described internally strictly by reference number and code name. “We are not in the business for the glory,” Peter Lürssen, the C.E.O., told a reporter. The closest thing to an encyclopedia of yacht ownership is a site called SuperYachtFan, run by a longtime researcher who identifies himself only as Peter, with a disclaimer that he relies partly on “rumors” but makes efforts to confirm them. In an e-mail, he told me that he studies shell companies, navigation routes, paparazzi photos, and local media in various languages to maintain a database with more than thirteen hundred supposed owners. Some ask him to remove their names, but he thinks that members of that economic echelon should regard the attention as a “fact of life.”

To work in the industry, staff must adhere to the culture of secrecy, often enforced by N.D.A.s. On one yacht, O’Shannassy, the captain, learned to communicate in code with the helicopter pilot who regularly flew the owner from Switzerland to the Mediterranean. Before takeoff, the pilot would call with a cryptic report on whether the party included the presence of a Pomeranian. If any guest happened to overhear, their cover story was that a customs declaration required details about pets. In fact, the lapdog was a constant companion of the owner’s wife; if the Pomeranian was in the helicopter, so was she. “If no dog was in the helicopter,” O’Shannassy recalled, the owner was bringing “somebody else.” It was the captain’s duty to rebroadcast the news across the yacht’s internal radio: “Helicopter launched, no dog, I repeat no dog today”—the signal for the crew to ready the main cabin for the mistress, instead of the wife. They swapped out dresses, family photos, bathroom supplies, favored drinks in the fridge. On one occasion, the code got garbled, and the helicopter landed with an unanticipated Pomeranian. Afterward, the owner summoned O’Shannassy and said, “Brendan, I hope you never have such a situation, but if you do I recommend making sure the correct dresses are hanging when your wife comes into your room.”

In the hierarchy on board a yacht, the most delicate duties tend to trickle down to the least powerful. Yacht crew—yachties, as they’re known—trade manual labor and obedience for cash and adventure. On a well-staffed boat, the “interior team” operates at a forensic level of detail: they’ll use Q-tips to polish the rim of your toilet, tweezers to lift your fried-chicken crumbs from the teak, a toothbrush to clean the treads of your staircase.

Many are English-speaking twentysomethings, who find work by doing the “dock walk,” passing out résumés at marinas. The deals can be alluring: thirty-five hundred dollars a month for deckhands; fifty thousand dollars in tips for a decent summer in the Med. For captains, the size of the boat matters—they tend to earn about a thousand dollars per foot per year.

Yachties are an attractive lot, a community of the toned and chipper, which does not happen by chance; their résumés circulate with head shots. Before Andy Cohen was a talk-show host, he was the head of production and development at Bravo, where he green-lighted a reality show about a yacht crew: “It’s a total pressure cooker, and they’re actually living together while they’re working. Oh, and by the way, half of them are having sex with each other. What’s not going to be a hit about that?” The result, the gleefully seamy “Below Deck,” has been among the network’s top-rated shows for nearly a decade.

To stay in the business, captains and crew must absorb varying degrees of petty tyranny. An owner once gave O’Shannassy “a verbal beating” for failing to negotiate a lower price on champagne flutes etched with the yacht’s logo. In such moments, the captain responds with a deferential mantra: “There is no excuse. Your instruction was clear. I can only endeavor to make it better for next time.”

The job comes with perilously little protection. A big yacht is effectively a corporation with a rigid hierarchy and no H.R. department. In recent years, the industry has fielded increasingly outspoken complaints about sexual abuse, toxic impunity, and a disregard for mental health. A 2018 survey by the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network found that more than half of the women who work as yacht crew had experienced harassment, discrimination, or bullying on board. More than four-fifths of the men and women surveyed reported low morale.

Karine Rayson worked on yachts for four years, rising to the position of “chief stew,” or stewardess. Eventually, she found herself “thinking of business ideas while vacuuming,” and tiring of the culture of entitlement. She recalled an episode in the Maldives when “a guest took a Jet Ski and smashed into a marine reserve. That damaged the coral, and broke his Jet Ski, so he had to clamber over the rocks and find his way to the shore. It was a private hotel, and the security got him and said, ‘Look, there’s a large fine, you have to pay.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, the boat will pay for it.’ ” Rayson went back to school and became a psychotherapist. After a period of counselling inmates in maximum-security prisons, she now works with yacht crew, who meet with her online from around the world.

Rayson’s clients report a range of scenarios beyond the boundaries of ordinary employment: guests who did so much cocaine that they had no appetite for a chef’s meals; armed men who raided a boat offshore and threatened to take crew members to another country; owners who vowed that if a young stew told anyone about abuse she suffered on board they’d call in the Mafia and “skin me alive.” Bound by N.D.A.s, crew at sea have little recourse.“We were paranoid that our e-mails were being reviewed, or we were getting bugged,” Rayson said.

She runs an “exit strategy” course to help crew find jobs when they’re back on land. The adjustment isn’t easy, she said: “You’re getting paid good money to clean a toilet. So, when you take your C.V. to land-based employers, they might question your skill set.” Despite the stresses of yachting work, Rayson said, “a lot of them struggle with integration into land-based life, because they have all their bills paid for them, so they don’t pay for food. They don’t pay for rent. It’s a huge shock.”

It doesn’t take long at sea to learn that nothing is too rich to rust. The ocean air tarnishes metal ten times as fast as on land; saltwater infiltrates from below. Left untouched, a single corroding ulcer will puncture tanks, seize a motor, even collapse a hull. There are tricks, of course—shield sensitive parts with resin, have your staff buff away blemishes—but you can insulate a machine from its surroundings for only so long.

Hang around the superyacht world for a while and you see the metaphor everywhere. Four months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the war had eaten a hole in his myths of competence. The Western campaign to isolate him and his oligarchs was proving more durable than most had predicted. Even if the seizures of yachts were mired in legal disputes, Finley, the former C.I.A. officer, saw them as a vital “pressure point.” She said, “The oligarchs supported Putin because he provided stable authoritarianism, and he can no longer guarantee that stability. And that’s when you start to have cracks.”

For all its profits from Russian clients, the yachting industry was unsentimental. Brokers stripped photos of Russian yachts from their Web sites; Lürssen, the German builder, sent questionnaires to clients asking who, exactly, they were. Business was roaring, and, if some Russians were cast out of the have-yachts, other buyers would replace them.

On a cloudless morning in Viareggio, a Tuscan town that builds almost a fifth of the world’s superyachts, a family of first-time owners from Tel Aviv made the final, fraught preparations. Down by the docks, their new boat was suspended above the water on slings, ready to be lowered for its official launch. The scene was set for a ceremony: white flags in the wind, a plexiglass lectern. It felt like the obverse of the dockside scrum at the Palm Beach show; by this point in the buying process, nobody was getting vetted through binoculars. Waitresses handed out glasses of wine. The yacht venders were in suits, but the new owners were in upscale Euro casual: untucked linen, tight jeans, twelve-hundred-dollar Prada sneakers. The family declined to speak to me (and the company declined to identify them). They had come asking for a smaller boat, but the sales staff had talked them up to a hundred and eleven feet. The Victorians would have been impressed.

The C.E.O. of Azimut Benetti, Marco Valle, was in a buoyant mood. “Sun. Breeze. Perfect day to launch a boat, right?” he told the owners. He applauded them for taking the “first step up the big staircase.” The selling of the next vessel had already begun.

Hanging aloft, their yacht looked like an artifact in the making; it was easy to imagine a future civilization sifting the sediment and discovering that an earlier society had engaged in a building spree of sumptuous arks, with accommodations for dozens of servants but only a few lucky passengers, plus the occasional Pomeranian.

We approached the hull, where a bottle of spumante hung from a ribbon in Italian colors. Two members of the family pulled back the bottle and slung it against the yacht. It bounced off and failed to shatter. “Oh, that’s bad luck,” a woman murmured beside me. Tales of that unhappy omen abound. In one memorable case, the bottle failed to break on Zaca, a schooner that belonged to Errol Flynn. In the years that followed, the crew mutinied and the boat sank; after being re-floated, it became the setting for Flynn’s descent into cocaine, alcohol, orgies, and drug smuggling. When Flynn died, new owners brought in an archdeacon for an onboard exorcism.

In the present case, the bottle broke on the second hit, and confetti rained down. As the family crowded around their yacht for photos, I asked Valle, the C.E.O., about the shortage of new boats. “Twenty-six years I’ve been in the nautical business—never been like this,” he said. He couldn’t hire enough welders and carpenters. “I don’t know for how long it will last, but we’ll try to get the profits right now.”

Whatever comes, the white-boat world is preparing to insure future profits, too. In recent years, big builders and brokers have sponsored a rebranding campaign dedicated to “improving the perception of superyachting.” (Among its recommendations: fewer ads with girls in bikinis and high heels.) The goal is partly to defuse #EatTheRich, but mostly it is to soothe skittish buyers. Even the dramatic increase in yacht ownership has not kept up with forecasts of the global growth in billionaires—a disparity that represents the “one dark cloud we can see on the horizon,” as Øino, the naval architect, said during an industry talk in Norway. He warned his colleagues that they needed to reach those “potential yacht owners who, for some reason, have decided not to step up to the plate.”

But, to a certain kind of yacht buyer, even aggressive scrutiny can feel like an advertisement—a reminder that, with enough access and cash, you can ride out almost any storm. In April, weeks after the fugitive Motor Yacht A went silent, it was rediscovered in physical form, buffed to a shine and moored along a creek in the United Arab Emirates. The owner, Melnichenko, had been sanctioned by the E.U., Switzerland, Australia, and the U.K. Yet the Emirates had rejected requests to join those sanctions and had become a favored wartime haven for Russian money. Motor Yacht A was once again arrayed in almost plain sight, like semaphore flags in the wind. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The repressive, authoritarian soul of “ Thomas the Tank Engine .” 

Why the last snow on Earth may be red .

Harper Lee’s abandoned true-crime novel .

How the super-rich are preparing for doomsday .

What if a pill could give you all the benefits of a workout ?

A photographer’s college classmates, back then and now .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Ben McGrath

By Rachel Syme

By Nicola Twilley

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

Yachting World

• Digital Edition

Best luxury yacht: 7 ultimate luxury cruisers you can buy

Bavaria C46 review: More accommodation and better performance?

Best catamaran and multihull: We sail the very best yachts on two and three hulls

Final week for applications for women’s Ocean 50 trimaran programme

Advice on making an Atlantic crossing from people who have done it

Great seamanship: Chasing the Dawn

How do you solve problems at sea? Learning from the best is a good way to start

10 women doing great things in competitive sailing right now

Best family yacht: our pick of the best yachts for sailing with the family

Air Yacht 80 a dream package

Is your anti-foul choice contributing to Global warming?

Boundless adventure: The Outremer 52

Taking bluewater cruising to a new level

‘Nothing is set in stone until the finish gun’ – Nikki Henderson

Clarisse Crémer cleared following Vendée cheating accusations

‘What I learned from the America’s Cup event in Jeddah’ – Matt Sheahan

World’s coolest yachts: Monitor – the 1955 foiling boat

Jeanneau Yachts 55 review: Thinking outside the box

Sailing from Annapolis to Iceland on the viking routes of old

American cruisers feared dead after yacht stolen in Grenada prison break

Your expert guide to routing for multihulls

Catamarans and multihulls.

Caudrelier wins first ever solo round the world race in foiling Ultim

Nautitech 48 Open first look: last design of legend Marc Lombard

Some of the world’s biggest, coolest catamarans go racing

Six solo skippers ready to race 100ft foiling multihulls around the world

Sailing across the atlantic.

How to prepare for an Atlantic crossing with the ARC

What’s the best autopilot kit for a transatlantic?

The ‘easy’ way to sail across the Atlantic?

New mutihulls take on an Atlantic crossing

How to prepare for an Atlantic crossing

Satellite communication: how to stay connected at sea

Extraordinary boats.

Extraordinary boats: Maluka – restoration of a 1932 classic

World’s fastest monohull: Malizia-Seaexplorer IMOCA 60

Extraordinary boats: Infiniti 52 – an incredible story and boat

Falken restoration: Round the World racer turned perfect cruiser

Extraordinary boats: Sailing the sustainable Ecoracer 25

Extraordinary boats: The Sam Manuard foiling mini 6.50

Practical cruising.

Great seamanship: Slow Boat to Uruguay

How to find the right weather window

How to manoeuvre a yacht under power

Great seamanship: Bound for Cape Horn

Allures 40.9 vs Ovni 400: French aluminium centreboarders go head-to-head

CNB 66 yacht test: Intoxicating cruiser is a cut above the mainstream

Saffier SE37 Lounge test: A veritable supercar of the seas

Swan 65 test: The triumphant return of a true sailing icon

• NAVIS Digital Store - Activate Your Subscription

NAVIS is a unique publication dedicated to the design of luxury yachts, sailboats, and the lifestyle around them.

Welcome to NAVIS Superyacht World

A selection of the best Superyachts and Gigayachts in the world, expert articles of this masterpieces of design, technology and taste.

Exclusive Superyacht Articles and Reviews

Receive NAVIS Luxury Yacht Magazine to your door every two month. 120 pages of only the best Superyachts and Superyacht Charters Destinations in the world.

Subscribe to NAVIS Magazine Print and Digital Edition

Explore the Majestic Alunya: Benetti's Newest Luxury Yacht Masterpiece

The Majestic Transformation of Carinthia VII: A Luxury Yachting Revolution

Breakthrough in Luxury Sailing: Royal Huisman's Nilaya Sets New Records

Discover Tankoa's Kinda: A 50-Meter Hybrid Yacht Marvel in Placid Paradise

Thrilling Victory: Alive and LawConnect Dominate 2023 Rolex Sydney Hobart Race

World of Minimalist Luxury Inside the Rolls-Royce Ghost

The Chanler at Cliff Walk: Romantic Luxury & Culinary Excellence in Newport

Misunderstood Guardians of the Ocean Sharks

Highlights 2023 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show

Navis superyacht world news.

The Maiden Voyage of Innovation: Damen Yachting's FIVE OCEANS Yacht Support Launch

Infinite Jest's Remarkable Journey from Concept to Antarctic Waters

Tankoa Yachts Introduces the 70mt Milano

Winch Design Unveils Project Reverie

Southern Wind Welcomes the Majestic SW96#05 Liberty to Its Fleet

Scuba Safety On board: Protecting Lives at Sea

Heesen's Iris Blue: A Paradigm of Dutch Maritime Mastery

Royal Huisman's Project 406: Redefining Luxury Sportfishing

Damen Yachting Ushers in 2024 with the Delivery of the Amels 60 SATEMI

Heesen's M/Y Cinderella Noel IV

Feadship Pioneers Eco-Friendly Yachting with Carbon-Neutral Superyacht Initiative

Cruising into Winter Bliss

Oceanco's Y726: A Masterpiece in Luxury Yachting

The Revolutionary 95-Foot Project Ouzel Sailing Yacht

Lürssen Unveils Project Ali Baba Set to Redefine Luxury

Bentley and Contest Yachts: A Symphony of Luxury and Craftsmanship

Lürssen Proudly Announces the Launch of "Project CALI"

Azimut Grande 36M: A Pinnacle of Superyacht Excellence

Project 1011: An Ingenious Fusion of Luxury and Innovation

Lürssen Successfully Redelivers 97m Carinthia VII

• THE PRINCESS PASSPORT
• Email Newsletter
• Yacht Walkthroughs
• Destinations
• Electronics
• Best Marine Electronics & Technology
• Boating Safety

View the latest luxury yachts, superyachts, motoryachts, trawlers and more.

New Flagship for Bering Yachts: The B165

The explorer yacht was introduced at the Dubai International Boat Show.

Power Catamaran Popularity Rising

With more boaters embracing the power-catamaran lifestyle, boatbuilders and charter companies alike are seeing an increase in demand.

“Energy Observer” Zero-Emission Boat Showcases Sustainability

The self-sufficient boat has traveled more than 64,000 nautical miles to help educate the public.

Princess Yachts’ Y95: A Flagship Flybridge

The 23-knot Princess Yachts Y95 leads the British boatbuilder’s four-model Y Class open-flybridge series.

Latest Yacht Reviews

For Sale: Princess Yachts F55

The 2020, 33-knot Princess Yachts F55 Impulse Power is on the market at $1.9 million.

For Sale: Horizon Power Catamarans 52

We take a closer look at this three-stateroom, 2022 Horizon PC52 with a $2.145 million asking price.

More Yacht Reviews

An Unusual Downeast Yacht For Sale

This one-owner 46-foot Jarvis Newman Bounder has a long history with Lyman-Morse. Asking Price: $375,000.

Hunter Scott Duffy 38 Downeast Flybridge Cruiser For Sale

The 38-foot, Deceiver, a Hunter Scott Custom Boatworks build has a $349,000 asking price.

Meet the Vicem Yachts 65 Classic Flybridge

The Vicem Yachts 65 Classic Flybridge has timeless downeast lines, two or three staterooms and cold-molded mahogany construction.

More Downeast

Express and Flybridge Cruisers

14 Great Pocket Cruisers in 2023

Our experts review some of the top pocket cruisers, mini yachts and voyaging vessels under 50 feet in length.

Riviera’s 4600 Sport Yacht Platinum Edition to Debut at FLIBS

This luxury express cruiser comes with IPS diesels and two or three staterooms.

Reviewed: Prestige Yachts 590S

The Prestige Yachts 590S is a nearly 30-knot yacht with room for the cruising family.

More Express and Flybridge Cruisers

Long Range Cruisers

Outer Reef Yachts Debuts 670 Azure Sport Yacht

This long-range bluewater cruiser is notable for its stout build, homelike accommodations and an inside-outside layout.

Horizon Yachts FD110 Trideck Reviewed

Mansion-type volume, a seakindly hull form and a 3,000-nautical-mile range define the Horizon Yachts FD110 Trideck.

Princess Yachts’ Superpowered X80

The Princess X80 is a 31-knot socializing machine with a “super flybridge.”

More Long Range Cruisers

Motoryachts

Riviera Launches 58 Sports Motor Yacht

The Riviera 58 SMY has three staterooms and Volvo Penta IPS diesels.

Palatial Powercat

The 20-knot, all-aluminum SilverCat 22M has an open floor plan and cruising accommodations for six.

More Motoryachts

Sailing Yachts

Reminiscing “Freedom”: a 12 Metre Classic

This renowned 12 Metre yacht didn’t win the race, but it won the heart of our writer.

Superyacht Smack Talk

The team behind the 154-foot Nilaya from Royal Huisman throws down with news that the yacht has arrived in Antigua ready to race.

Revisiting the Classic Cal 40

A sailor and an iconic sailboat are reunited for a voyage down memory lane.

More Sailing Yachts

Sport Fishing Yachts

Release Marine Launches 43 Gameboat

The Release 43 Gameboat is a modern take on the classic Merritt 43 sport-fisher.

Viking’s New 90-Foot Sportfish Yacht

New Jersey’s Viking Yachts has launched its new flagship 90-foot Convertible, a go-anywhere fishing machine.

Tony Soprano’s Boat “The Stugots” is for Sale

The 1999 Cape Fear 47, now renamed Never Enough , was featured in season one of the HBO series.

More Sport Fishing Boats

Superyachts

Charter Clients, Start Your Engines

Edmiston says a number of yachts in its fleet are still open for bookings at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Meet the Ocean Alexander 35M Puro

The 113-foot flagship yacht will debut at the Palm Beach International Boat Show.

More Superyachts

One Luxurious Dayboat

The Rebel 50 G is a 36-knot RIB from SACS Tecnorib that is equally at home as a yacht tender or a standalone cruiser.

Wooden Boats’ Semi-Bespoke Speedster

Wooden Boats Limo Tender 27 delivers comfort and 37-knot speed.

Capoforte’s All-Electric Dayboat

The 24-foot SQ240i is the first all-electric center-console from Capoforte in Italy.

More Tenders

Go-Anywhere Style: the Nordhavn 112

This Nordhavn 112 is on the drawing board now, with Hull No. 1 still available for order.

Top 15 Trawlers for 2023

Our experts review 15 of the top trawler and trawler-style yachts, from owner-operator-size bluewater-cruising platforms to globe-girdling supersized explorer yachts that can cross oceans to far-flung waypoints.

More Trawlers

• Digital Edition
• Customer Service
• Privacy Policy
• Email Newsletters
• Cruising World
• Sailing World
• Salt Water Sportsman
• Sport Fishing
• Wakeboarding

Check out the Winter 2024 edition of ONBOARD Magazine

Read the full digital edition here or view the articles below.

Autumn 2023

Winter berths

Caribbean Regattas 2024

The PADI Pro journey

Superyacht Training Courses

Refit essentials

Superyacht Software

Read the latest edition.

Entertainment systems

Superyacht communications

Safety systems onboard

Superyacht technology essentials

Superyacht technology

Talk to us about the annual tenders & toys supplement 2024, the uk superyacht industry.

Superyacht training UK

Insurance and legal professionals in the UK

Planned maintenance software

Heirlooms Linens

UK Superyacht tenders

Pendennis Shipyard

UK Essential superyacht companies

Rapid Marine

Superyacht toys.

Superyacht Toys

Yachtbeach inflatables

Superyacht Inflatables

The best superyacht toys 2023

Electric Jetboards 2023

Discover SEAmagine

Takuma EFoil

Meet your experts.

Ask the Experts

Mangusta Oceano 44

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 77 - Spring 2023

Lynx Yachts – Crossover 27 Avontuur

Benetti FB 276 – Metis

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 76 - Winter 2022-2023

Acala di Cantiere delle Marche

Mangusta Oceano 50

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 75 - Autumn 2022

Sanlorenzo SP 110

Nautor’s Swan – Swan 120

Southern Wind SW 105 GT – Taniwha

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 74 - Summer 2022

Sanlorenzo 44 Alloy

Sunseeker 90 Ocean

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 73 - Spring 2022

Rossetti 38 m Emocean

Extra Yachts X96 Triplex

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 72 - Winter 2021-2022

Evo Yachts V8

Salnorenzo SL120A

Benetti Motopanfilo 37M

Tankoa Yacht – S501 Olokun

RP-Nauta 100 Morgana

The sea trial was pubblished in Superyacht 71 - Autumn 2021

Columbus Sport 50 K2

Entusiasmo per YARE 2024: record di partecipanti

Benetti svela M/Y Triumph al Palm Beach International Boat Show 2024

Benetti, [...]

Prende il via la Yachting Week in Toscana

Yachting [...]

Antonini Navi posa la chiglia Seamore 34

Destination: Riva. Benvenuti al nuovo Riva Privée al Jeddah Yacht Club

Gedda, [...]

Lusben tra i protagonisti di Yare 2024

Lusben [...]

Saim Marine incontra imprese del settore e comandanti allo Yare 2024

The Italian Sea Group: sigla una partnership con l’importante società BehneMar Yachting Consultancy

Prosegue [...]

Convergence 2024 di Ferretti Group: a Madrid per puntare sulla nautica del futuro

Tankoa Yachts presenta il 70 metri Milano

Sviluppato [...]

Besenzoni porte aperte ai comandanti dell’Italian Yacht Masters

La 24ª edizione del Benetti Yachtmaster esplora le tematiche del lifestyle e il ruolo centrale del comandante

Benetti [...]

The Italian Sea Group annuncia la posa della chiglia del megayacht Admiral 88

Varato il nuovo Benetti Oasis 34 M “Sirena”

Viareggio, [...]

Il 2024 è iniziato con il vento in poppa per Cantiere delle Marche

Siamo [...]

CRN presenta il superyacht CRN MY Comfortably Numb 60m

Prestazioni [...]

CMC Marine USA: nuova struttura interna per una stagione di crescita

Forte [...]

The Italian Sea Group: procedono le attività di allestimento del quarto motor yacht Admiral della serie S-FORCE 55

Marina [...]

SUPERYACHTS.NEWS Launches its Russian and Spanish editions

The already existing Italian and English editions of Superyachts.News are now joined by two other publications, in Russian and Spanish

The proof of this  success  is the rapid rise of the sixth magazine by The International Yachting Media in the indexing charts, where Superyachts.News is  stable in the first three places of the Web rankings  of the various countries in the world.

“ Thanks to this excellent feedback, clearly evidenced by the figures it expresses, Superyachts.News is calling into question the traditional paradigms of nautical information on superyachts”,  explains  Luca D’Ambrosio,   founder of The International Yachting Media.

”  Superyachts market has always paid special attention to Russia  –  continues Luca D’Ambrosio –  The Cyrillic alphabet thus becomes part of the group of languages with which The International Yachting Media reaches its readers all over the world and will soon be included in the panel of languages which already populate the other magazines of our editorial group.  Spanish, already existing in the other magazines, is the second most widespread language in the world . So, it goes without saying that Superyachts.News is now able to effectively address the boat owners from the countries where this language is spoken”.

The magazine, in fact, was created to meet a precise market need: readers were asking for a container specifically dedicated to the world of superyachts, capable of gathering,  in a unique luxury showcase, articles, news and sea trials  of all those boats that, starting from 24 meters, today reach and exceed 100 meters in length.

Superyachts.News brings  the care and spectacularity of paper images  to the Web,  thanks to the use of glossy magazine graphic layout . The magazine is designed to offer a rich, pleasant and functional experience, made user-friendly by  a technology that, initially created for smartphones, was subsequently adapted for desktop use . Superyachts. News thus takes off, also speaking Russian and Spanish. A success that knows no bounds.

Superyachts.News is a The International Yachting Media publication.

You might be interested in

Superyacht Cup Palma gets off to a great start among rookies and prominent veterans

La Belle Classe Superyachts Business Symposium, yachting at the heart of Monaco’s challenges

Monaco Energy Boat Challenge returns in July for its 11th edition

International Smart & Sustainable Marina Awards, the final stages of the sustainable yachting awards

Subscribe for latest updates.

Sign up to receive the best of superyachts news, world premieres and shipyards new models.

The only ADVERTISING FREE newsletter

• Motorcycles
• Car of the Month
• Destinations
• Men’s Fashion
• Watch Collector
• Art & Collectibles
• Vacation Homes
• Celebrity Homes
• New Construction
• Home Design
• Electronics
• Fine Dining
• Baja Bay Club
• Costa Palmas
• Fairmont Doha
• Four Seasons Private Residences Dominican Republic at Tropicalia
• Reynolds Lake Oconee
• Scott Dunn Travel
• Wilson Audio
• 672 Wine Club
• Sports & Leisure
• Health & Wellness
• Best of the Best
• The Ultimate Gift Guide
• A Luxe New Wellness Club Is Opening in N.Y.C This Spring—Just Don’t Call It a Gym

Continuum Club will offer everything from personal training sessions to hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Rachel cormack.

Digital Editor

Rachel Cormack's Most Recent Stories

• This New 131-Foot Aluminum Catamaran Concept Can Take on a Transoceanic Expedition
• This New 150-Foot Superyacht Can Cruise Through Shallow Waters in Florida and the Bahamas With Ease
• Share This Article

A cross between a swanky members’ club and an upscale gym will arrive in the Big Apple this spring.

Related Stories

• Artist Chuck Close's Former Manhattan Home Hits the Market for $8 Million
• An Emmy-Winning TV Host Is Selling Her N.Y.C. Townhouse for $25 Million
• Leica Just Opened a New Two-Story Flagship Store and Gallery in N.Y.C. Here's a Look Inside.

“Our club in Greenwich Village was meticulously curated to both house the leading technology and services in the wellness space, and to do so in a cohesive, intentional, luxury environment,” Continuum’s chief revenue officer Tom Wingert said in a statement.

Beyond the bricks and mortar, Continuum Club will be staffed by a team of experts and will use artificial intelligence to create an enhanced, 360-degree wellness experience for members. The hyper-personalized, data-informed services on offer run the gamut from personal training sessions to hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Members can also partake in recovery treatments such as Himalayan salt saunas and cold plunges.

“We’ve brought an extraordinary team of NYC-based artisans together to create a sanctuary in the heart of the city that celebrates the heritage of the neighborhood and deeply incorporates nature in a way that encourages serenity amidst busy city life,” adds Wingert. “The space is truly one of one.”

Rachel Cormack is a digital editor at Robb Report. She cut her teeth writing for HuffPost, Concrete Playground, and several other online publications in Australia, before moving to New York at the…

Read More On:

• New York City

More Health & Wellness

How to Become Younger, According to a Biohacking Expert

Can a Wearable Help Heal Trauma? This Psychiatrist Says Yes

Supermodel John Pearson on Hot Yoga, Ayahuasca, and Losing His Vintage Omega

The 9 Best Daily Supplements, According to Renowned Longevity Doctor Peter Attia

Culinary Masters 2024

MAY 17 - 19 Join us for extraordinary meals from the nation’s brightest culinary minds.

Give the Gift of Luxury

Latest Galleries in Health & Wellness

The 20 Best Amazon Prime Day Men’s Grooming Deals, From Shaving Cream to Sunscreen

The 15 Best Hand Soap and Lotion Sets to Keep You Clean and Moisturized

More from our brands, asian celebrities were the mvps of paris fashion week, fanatics executive fires back at draftkings in court battle, reddit ipo: shares pop 48% in first day of trading, internet company nets $519 million, australian museum faces lawsuit for artwork that men cannot enter, the best yoga blocks to support any practice, according to instructors.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Peacock’s paris push: nbcuniversal streaming service plans 2024 olympics focus.

Multi-view, a redesigned Olympics streaming experience and 'GoldZone' are among the offerings on tap for the 2024 games.

By Alex Weprin

Alex Weprin

Media & Business Writer

• Share this article on Facebook
• Share this article on Twitter
• Share this article on Flipboard
• Share this article on Email
• Show additional share options
• Share this article on Linkedin
• Share this article on Pinit
• Share this article on Reddit
• Share this article on Tumblr
• Share this article on Whatsapp
• Share this article on Print
• Share this article on Comment

The relationship between Peacock and the Olympics goes back to the launch event for the NBCUniversal streaming service.

In January 2020, with the world mostly oblivious of what was coming just a few months later, NBC executives touted live streams from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a key selling point for Peacock’s launch.

Related Stories

'the boy and the heron' to stream on netflix worldwide, 'women talking' star kate hallett, herman tommeraas join 'sweetness' teen thriller (exclusive).

“I think the main thing we learned is that getting the content is table stakes,” says John Jelley, senior VP, of product and user experience for Peacock & global streaming at NBCUniversal, adding that during the 2022 Beijing winter games, NBCU rolled out pages for sports so viewers could do deep dives. Now, the company is taking it a step further: “We’re trying to reach casual fans who just really want to have someone who’s guiding them, but then also make sure that we can go as deep as you like with the content.”

That will manifest itself in a few ways. For the first time, Peacock will have multi-view, allowing users to watch four different events at once, on whatever device they want. At least for the 2024 games, the multi-view experiences will be curated by the Olympics team, choosing the most interesting events happening at any given moment.

“There’s 40 events now happening live, there’s a lot of content, what am I going to watch?” Jelley says, speaking to reporters in a conference room at NBC’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters. “And so we want to give users ways to discover the things that are most interesting to them, and so being able to say ‘hey, this is a first time Olympian, or this is a medal event,’ you’ll be able to see that in one view of all the trending things, and we’re looking at the data and seeing this is what people are watching.”

That show will also serve as a springboard for another Peacock streaming innovation: “Live Actions,” which will let viewers of the show click to keep watching a live event, even if the show is about to move on to another one.

Jelley says it was inspired by some experiments they did with Bravo reality shows, letting users click to watch expanded conversations or other scenes, or keep watching the editor cut.

“The learning we took is if there’s a passionate fan, they actually do want to go deeper and have that option to explore and discover something else,” he says. “Being able to unlock that and have the presenters of that show help guide you to that, felt like almost like the best of both worlds.”

The Olympics will continue a critical year for Peacock, coming just a few months after it hosted an exclusive NFL wild card game, a game that generated record streaming viewership.

And as executives at the company will be quick to tell you, unlike many other big streamers, Peacock was ad-supported from the beginning.

“We thought it was very important that our streaming products still had advertising at the core of what we were doing,” he added. “But it was nice, everyone went to SVOD and gave us about a four year head start in how we launched the product, how we thought about the product, how we build the product with advertisers and it’s actually been extremely successful. AVOD is not easy. It really cannot be your side hustle. We obsess about advertising and having advertising at the core of Peacock every single day.”

The Olympics, coming off of Peacock’s big NFL win, will test that approach even further.

“The Paris Olympics will mark another major milestone for Peacock’s leadership in live streaming with an unprecedented viewing experience that demonstrates our commitment to our customers, clients and partners,” said Kelly Campbell, President, Peacock and Direct-to-Consumer, NBCUniversal. “Following the Games, these new features will extend to other live events, joining the growing list of interactive elements and ad innovations that continue to set Peacock apart.”

And that will include some engagement with the real world. Among the sponsorship deals the company is looking at for this year’s games is partnering with a last mile delivery company, who could give Olympics viewers a chance to order snacks before the event begins.

THR Newsletters

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Ign union files unfair labor practice charge over layoffs, as doj takes on apple, netflix and spotify could stand to benefit, rupert murdoch knew of widespread phone hacking, prince harry’s lawyer claims, audacy reorganizes podcast division, sunsets cadence13 brand, laurene powell jobs throws support behind disney board and bob iger in proxy fight, cinematographers guild reaches tentative agreement with studios on craft-specific issues.