This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol.7. To see the full story, purchase your copy of the magazine here.
On a bright summer afternoon last September, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg walked onto a quay on the Venice lagoon to board a boat. It wasn’t Eos, the splendid 305-foot, three-masted schooner that she and her husband, the media mogul Barry Diller, own, which had been docked in the same slip days earlier.
No, this one was much smaller. A chic, retro-looking speedboat reminiscent of vintage Rivas, the handsome mahogany-hulled runabouts favored by the jet set in the 1960s. Though the boat, which was in Venice for the craftsmanship biennial Homo Faber, seemed petite from afar, when she pulled up to the dock, onlookers—and there were many, because clearly something was afoot—could see she was a monumental watercraft, in heft, power, and allure. In a city full of boats, this one stood out like an A-list movie star. Named BaBeBi, she is a 42-foot long Torpedo, one of 24 in existence, built by J Craft, a bespoke Swedish shipbuilder that will be exhibiting at the Palm Beach International Boat Show from March 19 through 23.
She is number 21 in J Craft’s production, built in 2023, and usually resides in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera. Her hull is metallic silver—a paint developed with BMW and exclusive to J Craft. Like all J Crafts, the convertible open cockpit is mahogany with teak flooring. The synthetic ivory steering wheel is a replica of the one found in 1963 GTO Ferraris, and made, like the originals, by Nardi in Italy. The exterior seating is diamond-stitched marine vinyl, in butter and daffodil yellow. The cabin, which sleeps four, is also clad in high-gloss mahogany, with Hermès linen seat cushions, custom Rosenthal porcelain, Iittala glassware, and Gense silverware designed by Prince Carl Philip of Sweden, son of J Craft’s first client, King Carl XVI Gustaf.
Von Furstenberg stepped aboard as the 6-cylinder diesel engines—there are two, from Volvo Penta—churned in the jade-hued water. J Craft’s Chief Technical Officer Johan Hallén backed the boat out of the slip, turned into the wide Giudecca Canal, and zoomed off toward the Lido for a “sea trial.”
The engines’ force was impressive, like a late-1960s muscle car when you give it the gas; they have a range of 280 nautical miles and can top 47 knots (54 mph), and the boat is certified to withstand 13-foot waves. Yet BaBeBi glided across the water like a swan—not a bump could be felt—and turned as effortlessly and tightly as an Olympic figure skater going for the gold. “It banks at 50 degrees,” the company’s owner, Radenko Milakovic, explains.
BaBeBi wended up the Grand Canal, past the bobbing black gondolas and the crowded vaporetti, to drop von Furstenberg at her apartment in the 15th-century Palazzo Brandolini, near the Rialto Bridge. Usually, motor boats of such size are not allowed in the narrow waterway, but officials made an exception for von Furstenberg, a civically active resident. The boat pulled up to the palazzo’s private porta d’acqua, or water gate, and, with the help of Hallén, she carefully disembarked. Then BaBeBi made another of her hairpin turns and elegantly motored back to the wide-open lagoon. “It’s very, very beautiful,” von Furstenberg swooned.
We are in the era of the luxury yacht—the class of vessels that range from the J Craft “super-luxe ‘tender,’” as von Furstenberg described BaBeBi (though she is much more than that, as you will see), with a base price of $1.8 million, to “superyachts,” the floating palaces that run from 100 feet to about 350 feet, and from $10 million to the moon.
There are now more than 6,000 superyachts at sea, two-thirds of them, or roughly 4,400, constructed in the 21st century, according to Ralph Dazert, Head of Intelligence at SuperYacht Times. About two dozen shipyards build them. There are several large firms, some of which also build military and cargo vessels.
Among the big players are Feadship Royal Dutch Shipyards, an association of two firms based in the Netherlands, which built LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s 333-foot Symphony in 2015, moored in the Saint-Tropez bay, and Lürssen, the German shipyard that produced Paul Allen’s 413-foot Octopus, launched in 2003, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s 452-foot Rising Sun, purposefully longer than Allen’s and delivered in 2004. Rising Sun, which has 82 rooms, including a gym, basketball court, wine cellar, and cinema, has been owned by former record executive David Geffen since 2010.
Then there are boutique companies such as Perini Navi, the Tuscan sailboat company that built Ellison’s 183-foot ketch Zenji; Benetti, the Livorno-based shipyard that produced former Topshop owner Philip Green’s 295-foot Lionheart in 2016; Benetti’s parent company Azimut, which also builds award-winning, innovative luxury boats; and Baglietto, a 170-year-old Italian shipyard that constructed La Barchetta, or “Little Boat,” for Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. She was indeed small.
Today, Baglietto specializes in superyachts with lightweight aluminum hulls and produces five or six boats a year, including VistaJet owner Thomas Flohr’s sleek 140-foot Nina J, which came with a hydroponic garden. “Now that is a normal detail,” Baglietto’s sales director Fabio Ermetto says. But back in the early 2000s, when the Nina J was commissioned, it was a head-scratcher. “When an owner comes and asks for something that doesn’t exist yet, a technology we don’t have, we have to go and find the supplier to work with us to satisfy the request.”
Post-pandemic, sales reached epic heights: “The years 2021 and 2022 were the best in the last 20 in our industry,” Ermetto says. Currently, there are about 100 to 110 new superyachts each year, and for those over 300 feet, which qualify as “mega-yachts,” Ermetto says: “Two to three a year—if that.”
Except for right now. “There are ten yachts being delivered that are over 100 meters,” or 328 feet, a size officially known as a “gigayacht,” reports Miriam Cain, author of Yachts: The Impossible Collection, published by Assouline. “That’s a record-breaking number.”
A good many of them will be on display, and for sale, at the 43rd annual Palm Beach International Boat Show this month. Set in the West Palm Beach marina, 55,000 visitors stroll the docks, taking in offerings from more than 600 exhibitors, including 800 boats. J Craft will have two on hand: Natalia, which the company owns and uses as a “show boat,” and Aquila, an American-owned Torpedo with a red-white-and-blue hull. She normally resides at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo and Fisher Island near Miami. Baglietto will also have a pair in Palm Beach: Jules, which is 133 feet, and Daybreak, which runs 170 feet. Both were delivered to American clients last year.
“American buyers are driving the market,” says Cain, who also serves as the editorial director for Northrop & Johnson, an American yacht broker based in Ft. Lauderdale.
“Tech billionaires, hedge fund people,” Dazert confirms. “You have to be a billionaire to order one of these yachts. Not just the money you have to fork out to buy it, but also run it.” Indeed, a 160-foot superyacht will easily require $35 million to buy, and another $2 to $3 million a year to run.
But it does take a pretty penny to purchase them. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s three-masted sailing yacht, Koru, which measures 417 feet and was delivered in 2023, reportedly cost $500 million. (She has an annual running budget of $30 million.) Koru also has a 246-foot “support” megayacht, which cost $75 million and carries the helicopter, with space for an additional 45 crew and guests plus supplies, and trails the mothership.
In 2011, tech billionaire Larry Ellison replaced Rising Sun with the 288-foot, Japanese-influenced Musashi, built by Feadship for $160 million, and named for a samurai warrior. She is a steel and aluminum construction, with an elevator, beauty room, spa, swimming pool, indoor and outdoor gyms, screening room, basketball court, and a crane to launch racing boats. Musashi is moored in Cannes each year during the film festival—Ellison is a passionate cinephile who recently acquired a controlling stake in Paramount Pictures’ parent company—and in 2022, she appeared on the Netflix series The Dropout.
Last year, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg dropped nearly $300 million for Launchpad, a 387-foot Feadship-built giga-yacht originally commissioned by a Russian. (Russian-owned luxury yachts are among the prized assets that have been seized by governments since the Ukraine invasion in early 2022.) In 2023, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt paid $158 million for Kismet, a 312-foot beauty built by Lürssen in 2014; Schmidt renamed her Whisper, and she has all the usual five-star specs, including a pool, sauna, cinema, and gym.
At the Palm Beach Boat Show, you see those sorts of yachts, and more. “I think it’s the best show—it’s certainly my favorite,” Dazert says. “You are right in the heart of one of the very richest areas in the world, it’s not too large, and there are serious buyers, who you don’t even register as they walk by. They may have Ocean Pacific sunglasses and shorts on, but they are billionaires, and they buy boats.”