The Daily Beast Podcast - Secrets of Trump’s Tarnished Gilded Age

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

Author Evan Osnos joins Joanna Coles to parse the twisted games the world's wealthiest play with and aboard their crazy expensive yachts. As tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg snap up megayachts, Osnos, author of 'The Haves and Have-Yachts,' unpacks what these floating palaces reveal about a seismic shift in American wealth and power. He explains why Donald Trump shut down the KleptoCapture task force, how oligarch envy shapes Trump's worldview, and what it means that he once owned a Saudi arms dealer's yacht—but hated being on it. From Adnan Khashoggi to Elon Musk, Osnos traces the rise of ostentatious wealth, the decline of discretion, and why the modern billionaire isn't satisfied with private jets—they also want political control. Plus, how Musk crossed a line even Andrew Carnegie didn't, and why Americans may finally be waking up to a new, gilded threat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trump is basically eliminating the category of white-collar crime as an idea. I'm Joanna Coles. You are listening or watching or dancing to the Daily Beast podcast, and we have such a treat for you today. We have the author, Evan Osnos, who's on staff at the New Yorker, here to talk about his new book, The Havs and the Hav Yots. It's the Read of the Summer. If you're going on a yacht this summer, especially a gig a yacht, then you need to take this book with you. and antagonize your hosts. So let's get into it. All right, Evanosnos, I cannot wait to talk to you about the have and the have yachts.

I want to hold the book up because it's a most beautiful cover of this extraordinary yacht. But it's really dispatches about the rich and the richest behavior and the new norms, which we're all tracking on social media too. So let's start off with the ultimate symbol of deep, deep wealth, the yacht. How big are they? What defines a super yacht? So there are gradations. To go from a boat to a yacht, you need to hire a crew. That turns it into a yacht, in effect. At a certain point, when you get to be about 100 feet, then you're a super yacht, if you get to be about 235 feet, you're a mega yacht. And if you are 295 feet, which, you know, is whatever that is, about a football pitch.

The length of a New York block. Exactly. Then you are a good. giga yacht. A giga yacht? Yeah. It's a vocabulary that didn't exist, you know, until relatively recently. And I should point out that now because of the giga yachts, the smaller yachts are known in the industry by a rather deadly phrase, which is the pocket yacht. Oh, God, that you would be invited on a pocket yacht. And you would just have to say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not coming on the pocket yacht. Yeah, that's a tough one to accept. So who's got the biggest yacht in the world. Well, they're measured by different standards like volume or the immortal phrase L-O-A, which stands for length overall. But perhaps most significantly, the most famous giant yacht of the moment is

Jeff Bezos's yacht, which is called Cora. And I'm using the singular, but that's not quite right, because it's actually two yachts, one that you play on and then one that carries all your stuff, like your helicopter and so on. And that trails behind you, sort of shuffling along. And that trails behind you, sort of shuffling along the sea silently. Okay, so let's get into the details. How many staff does Jeff Bezos have? What is the size of staff you need to run something like Cora? Well, what's interesting is, in general, there is a law,

which is the international convention of the law of the sea, that governs how many guests can stay on a yacht overnight. This was passed after the sinking of the Titanic. And what it meant was that there were actually limits on the number of guests, typically 12, unless they can get a special exemption. But there's no limits on the number of staff. And as a result, you can get these really wild ratios where you can get, say, 50 or 60 staff members. 50 or 60? Attending to 12 guests.

I mean, as one super yacht owner said to me, he said, that's a ratio that you really can't get on land anymore. It's something that's closer to the 19th century. And what are those people all doing? What are the staff all doing? Are they all polishing the brass? Literally, in some cases, because, I mean, the super yacht as an object, as a machine, is in mortal tension with its environment. It starts to decompose the moment it touches water because it's made of metal and the sea is trying to eat it. Right, because the people that you know who have these mega yachts, they always seem to be in refurbishment land, right? And it takes two years and they're having the hull scraped or whatever. Well, I mean, the fact is a typical gig of yacht or one of these giant yachts will cost you, let's say, $500 million.

Right. And then every year it costs 10% of that value just to keep it afloat. So that means that you've spent your 500. Congratulations. Now you need to spend another $50 million a year so that it doesn't sink. And that's just purely on the physical upkeep of the yacht. So that doesn't mean? And the staff.

That includes the staff. So what else are the staff doing then? They're busy polishing the brass is. Obviously, you've got people in the kitchen. You've got people cleaning the process. place. But that doesn't take 60 people. Well, then there's the people in charge of the navigation. You've got the captain and the captain's team in a sense. You've also got, I wouldn't underestimate the number of people it takes to keep it clean at the level that they like. I mean, this is,

as somebody said to me, and I spoke to people who work on the crews of these, so known as the stew, for instance, which is short for stewarders. And what she said was, you know, we're literally using a a toothpick to clean the bits of the crumbs from the tempora that fall onto the teak into the little seams because you wouldn't want to leave them there you would course you wouldn't want to leave them there right but only ruin would lie beyond i mean after once you lose some control of that they will use literally a q-tip to clean the i need to you know what i mean yeah you're beginning to see yeah yeah yeah i think i need to import some of these standards in my own home actually in my loft apartment, where many things disappear down the cracks of the floorboards, never to be

seen again. I think you could go home and just abruptly announce that from now on you expect the family to maintain a certain yacht standard around that. So these things flourished during COVID, correct? That's right. Can you explain why? Yeah, there was literally, in numerical terms, the biggest boom in the sales and resales of yachts in the history of the industry. I mean, I to a lot of people who build them, buy them, sell them, brokers, and so on. And they say, we have never been making as much money as we are now. And it's for a couple reasons. One, these yachts are actually essentially social isolation in steel. So you can get on your yacht and sail out into the sea and not particularly worry about COVID. I think there was another thing.

So perhaps a more interesting psychological effect going on. And somebody described it to me this way. He said, look, we realized our mortality in a way that all of us. us had not fully visualized until COVID quite that way. And he said there were some of us who were sitting around saying maybe I'll buy a yacht someday. And he said, I decided to do it because life is short, let's do it. And then perhaps more importantly, all of a sudden, because of all this demand, there were waiting lists. And these are people not accustomed. Right, to a waiting list. Yeah, a waiting list. It's sort of an unfamiliar experience for some of them. But you can always find a way around the waiting list with enough cash. One guy in particular who was,

experiencing this, a guy named John Stalupi, who was upgrading from one yacht to another, he said, I decided, you know, what is my life really worth? What is one year of my life worth? And he decided that for $15 million, he could skip a three-year waiting list. And he said, is my life worth $5 million a year? Sure, of course. So I'm going to spend $15 million to be able to get my bigger yacht now. So he paid $15 million to jump the wait list? Correct. Right. Interesting. I mean, Can we use another word? I mean, it's insane, too, in a way that we're even engaging in this, that there is an economy of this kind is a fascinating fact. And really, the reason why I went into this kind of detail in the course of this research was because I came to believe that these are symbols of our era.

They are symbols of our time. There's a reason why a generation ago there were only 10 of those giant giga yachts. Today, there are 170 of them. They're the most expensive objects humans have ever figured out how to own. I mean, they're more expensive than the most expensive work of art, which of course was Salvador Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which not incidentally was bought by the Saudi Crown Prince and is now believed to be hanging on his giga yacht. Oh, how fascinating. Although I would have thought the sea air might damage it. One would, and many conservators have blanched at the...

at the reports that that's where this thing is. They think it should be at the Louvre. It should not be wherever it. And it's hard to know where it is exactly because it's not a museum. Right. Personal. Well, and it moves around. The boat moves around, right?

Let me start with the proliferation of the super yachts. Is that because there are just many more people with much more money now? Money that 20, 30, 50 years ago was inconceivable. And in America in particular, it's been fueled by the tech industry. Yeah, that's right. The yacht world has gone through these generations of wealth creation. First, it was the Greek shipping tycoons. So it was Aristotle Onassis and the Nyarkos family, and they would compete to see who had the biggest yacht.

And quite literally, in fact, actually. And it exceeded beyond their deaths. One of them at one point built a yacht that was larger than his rivals, even after he had shuffled off the mortal coil. It was kind of an amazing act of competition. Yeah, exactly. So we have a new generation of tech billionaires. Do most of them have yachts? Yeah, I was just reading an industry report recently that was celebrating the fact that the tech tycoons have really been a new golden age for the yacht industry.

Because people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Bren have bought yachts in the last few years. And I will point out that they actually have been able to take advantage of some global conditions that because of, because of the war in Ukraine, Europe has passed laws and there have been sanctions on specific Russian oligarchs that have prevented them from taking ownership of yachts that they commissioned. And in some cases, American tech billionaires have been able to pick up a giga yacht for a relative bargain price basement of three or four hundred billion, three or four hundred million dollars, because these things can't go into Russian hands. That's fascinating. And do you, and I noticed also that.

America actually set up a specific crew to search for oligarchs yachts, which Donald Trump has just closed. I think in the big, beautiful bill, they're actually closing the group of people that are searching for those. Yeah, they actually, it was even earlier than that. It was one of the first things he did, actually, after coming into office very quietly. It was just two little lines in a bill buried, but it dissolved what was known as the task force, clepto capture. That's right. Klepto capture. What a great title. I think Trump was offended by it on multiple levels. Look, Trump is basically eliminating the category of white-collar crime as an idea.

He finds that offensive. I think having been through it himself, it just it's, it brings a lot up for him. And so you see him pardoning people who have been convicted or pleaded guilty to white-collar crimes over and over again. And this is in a way the geopolitical dimension of that. He's saying to Russian oligarchs who have had their boats seized, you're free to go. Sorry for the misunderstanding. You know, off you go. And in a way, I think he's also saying that he doesn't believe that there is such a thing as an expression of illegitimate acquisition of wealth. He's rejecting the premise of oligarchy.

It's a very good description of him, actually. And it makes me think that I have never actually seen an image of Donald Trump on a boat because he doesn't famously have a super yacht. Well, actually, interesting, he doesn't. You're absolutely right. But he did at one point. And he bought a yacht that belonged to somebody. You'll remember this name.

It belonged to Adnan Khashoggi. Oh, yes. The arms dealer. Saudi arms dealer. Right. What happened was Khashoggi, who was a kind of, in a way, was sort of the Elon Musk of his time, right? He was a giant figure on the world stage. And but he eventually got into some trouble over taxes and things like that.

He was, and he had to sell off his yacht. Trump bought it at a, at a cheap price, as he likes to do. And he rebranded it the Trump princess. And the only problem was he hates boats. And he admitted as much. He said, I can't get off this yacht fast enough. But he liked showing it off to people. Of course, because it's a status symbol for it.

That's all it is for him. That's all it is. Eventually it was seized by his creditors when he had a bankruptcy. Of course it was. Of course it was. And I thought you were going to say it belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, actually. which was what happened to him during the campaign when he ended up leasing a plane and it was Epstein's plane and he thought he was going to die on Epstein's plane because it was a very turbulent journey. Anyway, it was Keshoye, arms dealer, pedophile, you know, great guys, great guys.

So one of the things that I find very interesting about this conspicuous display of consumption is the show-offery of it. And one thinks of Cora, we all know it's the world's biggest boat. We know it has a second boat flying behind it. Paparazzi endlessly show pictures of Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos' girlfriend in her thong enjoying herself on the day. Conviertes your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has you heard it?

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business is a super-exit with Shopify and your period of

a period of a month on shopify at shopify.com it used to be

that money was discreet that people didn't want to antagonize other

people by showing off their money one thinks of Warren Buffett

sort of proudly saying that he still has a house in Omaha

even Elon Musk who has the luxury of 15

children, I think, and counting at this point, but claimed he didn't have a house. What's changed about the nature of this very public display of wealth? It's a great question, and I'm fascinated by that, which is there was an old saying in the private wealth management business, which I mentioned in the book, which is that the whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned. For a long time. Say that one more time. That is such a good line. It's, you know, Moby Dick as financial management.

The whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned. That idea really dominated the way that super wealth behaved for the last few centuries, let's say, or at least certainly the beginning of the American 20th century. What's fascinating is John D. Rockefeller, when he was the first billionaire in America, had no publicist, in fact, until he was in his. 70s because he had no interest in a public profile. It was only after there was investigative reporting that started to put pressure on him, that he hired a publicist. And in fact, the publicist said, you know, you should do a little bit to repair the old image there. And so he started giving away dimes. It was kind of a famous first pre-social media way of rehabilitating his image. But there is a way in which, and I think there is a hugely important generational divide that you've hit on, which is that the Warren Buffett's and the Bill Gates's, which were an earlier generation than. Musk and who famously signed up to or Warren Buffett created the giving pledge and Bill Gates or was it the other way around Bill Gates devised I can't remember but they were the icons of it certainly yeah and that

was really important that they were going to give away most of their wealth and I think they the reason why it's it's why it's worth this is the case for paying attention to billionaires is that they dominate our our kind of moral horizons whether we want them to or not right it matters who is ruling these social hierarchies. Because as we know, if you spend any time on Wall Street or Silicon Valley, they are all looking up to see who and what the biggest dog is doing. Right. And if that person is living a life of almost cartoonish, flamboyant self-indulgence, well, that trickles down to borrow an old expression. And that becomes a way of living. And I think that the Bezo, that's sort of Bezos style. We sometimes talk about the paranoid style in American politics, but there's a Bezo style and a Trump

style, which is that you live in flamboyant brazenness. You live loud. And also it used to be, and I'm not saying that the way it used to be is the right way, but what's interesting is examining the change. It used to be that people would make an enormous amount of money and then go into public service or then go into politics. And that seems to, I mean, obviously you have Elon who's just done that. But Elon is an example.

It's a kind of warning example of not to do this because look, what's happening. happen to him. And maybe that's because Donald Trump is president and, you know, Donald Trump has a very specific idiosyncratic way of running the government. But hard to think that any very successful people would want to follow Elon, Elon's passage into government. I think this is a really important moment because Elon, by crossing a boundary that nobody else had ever crossed before. Andrew Carnegie, when he was the richest man in the world, never had an office in the White House complex and a department of government at his command. Musk, however, did what is a tempting problem when you get to be that rich or you get to be set successful in one

domain, is you assume that your specific acumen is actually a form of general intelligence that you can apply broadly. He came to Washington and he tripped a wire in the public consciousness. I think there was a way in which his, in a sense, undisguised, unabashed, unabashed pleasure at using his money to buy power and then using his power to make money, offended this subtle distinction in the American mind in which we are always teetering on the edge of worshipping money and being appalled by it. And we live in that ambivalent. That is the American nature. Well, and I think isn't there a sense of fairness in America that we applaud people who make a lot of money, we appreciate it, but it doesn't make us feel good when they then buy political power with it. That's not the deal somehow. Absolutely true. They can have many houses. They can have a big yacht. But it's not supposed to mean that you get incredible political benefits. Yeah, that's right. Americans actually have a, we're quite tolerant in comparative terms with other countries of economic inequality. we're not especially keen on political inequality. It bothers Americans. Now, I think you have to point out,

so then why do we have such profound political inequality? Because we do. And I think that's the gap between where the consciousness is and where the dysfunction of our politics fails to pick up on the public will. That's where I see things going. What we're seeing at the moment, and it's really interesting,

the mood over the last few months, essentially the, we'll call it the backlash to Musk period, It was a sign of something of a kind of spoilage in the public tolerance for this moment of super power, where people said that clangs against my concept of what it means to be really rich in this country. And I went to these Bernie Sanders rallies where I met people to my kind of surprise who had never been to a Sanders rally and were actually quite sympathetic to the Republican identity traditionally. They thought of themselves as I'm a wealth creator. I'm a business person. But they were feeling as if the word that came up over and over was, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid. And they're afraid of Trumpism? They're afraid of where the country is going if you have the world's richest man using a few keystrokes to shut down jobs and USAID. I mean, Bill Gates. And Medicare, right? Yeah. And ultimately, it's about, you know, Social Security.

and Medicare are cornerstones of how people imagine the American bargain, you know, what you put in and what you get out. And he doesn't participate in that. And so he doesn't understand it. So when Musk called it a Ponzi scheme, he was actually, it was a tell. It was a reveal of how secluded he's become from the actual American experience. And I think it's very easy for business people, too, to think, to underestimate luck and timing in terms of success. and also to assume you can take those skills, apply them to government, which is exactly what government is not. It is not a business.

It doesn't make sense and it's not screaming for consumers in the way that a lot of businesses have to. Yeah, I think we see this very often. You see it in all kinds of contexts. When somebody becomes quite successful, they're able to prune the world around them to such a degree that it actually insulates them from useful disagreement. And they begin to say, boy, I'm off. comfortable in my success here. I'm going to now, I'm going to apply that to other domains. One of the essays in this in this book is about Mark Zuckerberg. I spent time with him in a series of conversations when he was kind of in the grip of this blowback after the 2016 election.

And he was trying to, in a way, kind of reckon with his own sudden powers. I think that he, in a way, it was kind of fascinating to see somebody who had been swamped by the sudden realization that he had much greater responsibility than he thought he did. And I will tell you that perhaps like the most telling detail was that you remember this time when he went on a tour, a listening tour around the country, meeting regular people. Yes, of course. It was absolutely hilarious. That was when he was going through his years where he kept a diary.

And one year he read lots of books. One year he went around the country because he seemed surprised that it was there. And he met actual users of Facebook. And it went over rather poor. poorly among people. Well, it was very Marianne Twinnett of him. Here I am meeting a farmer in Wyoming and he's feeding a lamb and this is what farmers do. Who knew?

And I spoke to an executive who had a conversation with somebody who had organized the tour. And that person who'd been involved in the tour said, you know, the truth was, we knew that this looked terrible, but nobody could or would tell Mark. that is a that is in its way there's a pattern that scholars call authoritarian backlash which is what happens sometimes when you become so dominant in your position that you misjudge it and as a result you generate you ignite a backlash against you and I think that's what happened to musk well it also happened to Zuckerberg very much so so Zuckerberg is a fascinating character because he's gone from what we assumed was genuine and And who knows if it was at the time, but sort of relatively low-key, his grey T-shirt, his hoodies, he's kind of not interested in the world of wealth, although he was quietly accumulating lots of real estate, to now very flamboyant spending of money, statues to his wife, his and her, Porsches that especially kitted out. What's changed with him? I think he went through a period.

This backlash experience seems to have scorched him a bit. think he decided after a certain point that maybe I will never be loved by the public. And so maybe what I'll do is actually just adopt this other path. You know, it's amazing, Joanna. He had been modeling himself in those early years, that period you were describing earlier as he was sort of going down the Bill Gates path. Gates was a mentor. He and his wife, you know, Zuckerberg and his wife started a foundation. It was all quite similar, public health, education, and so on.

And at a certain point, when he realized, you know, I don't seem to be succeeding on that, on that path. The public doesn't like me. Well, maybe I'll just go the Bezos route and the Musk route, because that seems to be an option too. And I think part of the reason why I was, why I sort of wrote about all of these guys in this kind of detail is because I, in a sense, this is a study of what are the options of how to be. How to be rich. Well, and also what's fascinating is that it sounds like they were very performative. I noticed that Priscilla Chandris closed her school. She had a sort of charter experimental school in Palo Alto, which she just closed. The point of those things is surely the work, or at least one feels with Bill Gates,

that the point, Bill and Linda Gates, to be fair, the point of those foundations was the actual work, not as a PR exercise and not as a performative exercise. Well, what happened is that they became celebrities. I think this is one of the changes. You hit on something important earlier. this idea of what's different about this generation from the ones that came before. And it wasn't just that people stayed out of the public eye because they didn't want to attract political attention or retribution. It was also that they didn't necessarily aspire to celebrity. I mean, if you were

Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller, that really wasn't on your agenda. You had other things. You certainly wanted to be powerful and wealthy and you wanted to be able to influence politics. But you weren't, you didn't put yourself on the same plane as somebody who is a pop star who sings, who plays sports. There's a merger of these things. Okay, so that provokes a question that I was thinking about this week, which is that Elon Musk gets terrible backlash for his drug use and the fact that as far as we know, he currently has 15 babies with five different women.

And we have said that he's a rock star. We've said all these tech guys are rock stars, right? They're the new rock stars. No one says about Mick Jagger, the fact that he slept with 6,000, 8. thousand, 10,000 women somehow impacted his ability to be a rock star. No one says, oh, well, he's not dancing across the stage now because he's shagged too many people. And of course, Elon had a very dominant position in the government, so one doesn't want him out of his head. I would say, I think if Mick Jagger had, you know, run a department of government, people might have been

investigating it more thoroughly. Evan, hold that thought. We're just going to take some messages. We love our sponsors and we're back. such a hypocrisy in in the way that we approach things is all I'm saying and that we don't need perfect people to run office and we're never going to find them. And I think it's why so many people don't want to go into politics now because they, nobody's life is perfect, right? But Andrew Carnegie also didn't have the tools that we have now to track people. They didn't have social media to say hello or try and communicate with people or try and explain themselves. Can you talk a little bit about the role of social media in covering wealth and how the ultra-rich actually use it?

Yeah. You can't imagine this world as it is today without the fact that there is social media there, which both makes them visible and then also can make them voluble if they want to be. And that means that they are in a sense sort of in this constant competition with the public about who gets to define them. And so there are, I mean, at one point, for instance, in Zuckerberg's case, there was a pollster brought in to do public very quietly, doing public surveys about the public attitudes about him. And, you know, they would do things like even market test what videos he had from his home and from his backyard to see how did they score on social media. And look, in a way, it's, this is the world they created. And so they're very knowledgeable about how important it is. It, it. It, actually, it reminds me of something else that was very interesting to me. I interviewed Steve Huffman, who was the founder of Reddit, the CEO. And, you know, he, at one point, he said, I remember in the early days of the financial crisis that we began to see signs of it in the comments on Reddit before it was even a full-fledged public issue. Because social media is a canary in the coal mine. It's an indicator of where things are going. And that makes them both.

with very alert to trends, but also I think it can be quite anxiety producing. I mean, he actually, as a matter of fact, he is one of the people who has done this process of preparing for the end of the world. Huffman told me that he had gotten eye surgery to get rid of the need for contact lenses or eyeglasses so that he wouldn't be dependent on them in the event of doomsday. Does he have a prepper bunker? He told me that he has motorcycles and guns and ammo and things like that. And look, it's one of the things I write about in here is this culture of doomsday prepping among the very rich, which has kind of popped up, is fascinating because it's, this Silicon Valley, of course, is a place that positions itself in the public consciousness is the most optimistic. We are the solvers of problems. We are the makers of history.

But actually, that instinct to say I have to protect myself, as another CEO in Silicon Valley said to me, I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time. and I have an air filtration system in the bunker in my basement. I went to New Zealand to see some of these refuges. And I think in a way, what's happened is that as they've created these tools, because they know how powerful these tools are, they also know how quickly things can slip out of control and how vulnerable they are, how many points of failure they have. Another CEO said to me at one point, he said,

sure, I think it's a little bit silly, but it's probably not unreasonable to make these preparations because what are the chances that sometime in the next 50 years, these systems won't fail enough that we'll find ourselves with the lights off. That's a paraphrase. It feels like it would be a great drama to have a super yacht at sea. And then they think they've insulated themselves from everything. They've got a year's supply of food or whatever because there's a pandemic or something going on.

And then actually the danger comes from within. It's the crew. It's the crew who take them out, right? Well, actually, it's more true than you might have even known. I mean, there was a conversation here in New York at one point among some very wealthy figures, as described to me by one of the participants, where they were talking about where they would go in the event of a collapse. And as some of them said, look, it's not just about how do you get to Teterboro to get on the plane. It's what are you going to do about the pilot's family? Because if you don't bring the pilot's family, is he really going to fly you away?

Or maybe worse, he's going to. to do something so that you don't get on that plane. He's going to kill you and bring his family on the plane. I guess that's season two. If it's that much of a calamity, then it becomes the end of us, right? Well, these kinds of conversations, which I think to state the obvious, are insane making. I mean, they are kind of wild, but they are the inevitable consequence of a world in which, frankly, the gap is so profoundly large between being on the winning side and being on the losing

side, that they come to believe that it's almost unbearable to imagine falling on the wrong side of that gap because they can't bear the thought of it, because you don't get back across that canyon. One of the interesting things about having a lot of money and having been very successful in business is there is frequently a feeling that you can do no wrong. And yet one is constantly aware, and politics is a good arena for this, of you can spend buckets of money and it still won't get you the thing that actually weirdly Donald Trump has managed to get, which is why they're suddenly all having to pay homage to Donald Trump for pulling

something off that some of them couldn't achieve and that they wouldn't dare to enter that arena. Yeah. I mean, almost every Silicon Valley entrepreneur that I've come across harbors presidential ambitions. And some of them are never going to get there because socially they just can't even connect with an audience in the certainly the way that Donald Trump can. But clearly for people like that who are ambitious, who've had success, it's still something that they want to reach out for. It's the brass ring. It is. And I think that the Trump era has made many of them say,

well, hold on a second. I've known Donald Trump for 25 years. He was a buffoonish piece of the New York media furniture. And now he's the president of the United States. Well, surely, if he can do it, then I would be able to do a much better job. I mean, that has been a running, commentary for much of the last decade. And yet I do think it underappreciate something, which is that, as you said, quite rightly, I think a lot of these folks don't have quite the same, he has a, let's call what it is. He has a particularly idiosyncratic, social, political genius. I think a lot of us find it to be a terrible cancer upon the land, but it is a kind of genius. And his ability to take his own extraordinary advantages, being born the same.

scion of a real estate fortune and somehow positioning himself as the critic of the elite, who is also the aspirational figure for hardworking people around the country, is fascinating to me. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Just a throwaway comment somebody made to me at one point was that in a way, the reason why they stick with him, the reason why even though he doesn't fulfill the promises to revive coal mines in West Virginia or to bring back the things that he says he would, is that they see in him some way in which he expects more out of them, that he says to them, if things go right, you could be just like me. And on some level, I think people like that. I've heard it

from them. I mean, I think they're appalled by abuses of power, by the disproportionate ways in which the powerful are galloping ahead. But I think in him, but I think in him, him, his crudeness is also his credibility. All right. So I've got two more questions for you. One is about the space race. So very clearly between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk dying to get to Mars.

Jeff Bezos has got his own rocket company, Blue Origin. One of the most interesting recent trips of Blue Origin was Lauren Sanchez, taking her band of Gal Pals up to space, which really caused a backlash for her that I think she was surprised by it. And I certainly heard from people who were around the crew that went up with her that they were all surprised by the backlash. Yeah. Was this, why was that, do you think? You know, I think it was a case, this is how easy it is to misjudge the mood. And you think you've got it. You say, look, I'm doing this marvelous thing. It has echoes of NASA. Maybe this is what revived, this wonderful nostalgia for America's muscular moment in the middle of the 20th century. But actually,

the way it came off was quite differently, which is that I remember looking at the reaction. It was one of the rare things that could unite Megan Kelly and the Guardian. And both of these media, media perspectives were in agreement that this was a kind of gluttonous misuse of money, that it was not a celebration of science. It felt like something else. And it wasn't a celebration of feminism either. No, it was actually, as the Guardian put it, a strange funeral for America's abandonment of both feminism and science. And I thought, You know, there was a moment during that process on the live stream. They were reminding people out there that you two viewer could buy a ticket on a future blue origin flight. And the deposit, the down payment in effect, is $150,000.

Oh, you too. You too could do that. We should both sign up with them. So there it is. We'll have to be fitted for our suits. What's the symbolism of trying to get to Mars? Is that just a, you know, is that about his imagination? and his belief that we can do things that seem impossible?

Or does it indicate something else? I think that a generous reading would be to say this is his belief that it's a revival of the ambition that we had a century ago, that there are frontiers and that they can be conquered, and that we don't have to just sit here in the cool light of our phones and just be contented. That's the generous reading. I think that perhaps a more popular reading would be

that this is actually a guy who has effectively decided, I can't really fix what's broken here on this planet. I'm going to do something that is a little bit more entertaining. It's a little bit more gratifying to sort of play with the sci-fi future in my mind. And on top of it, you know, it has the sheen of being an act of great exploration. And I think there's a tension there. Because look, I actually don't mean to be sneering about the idea. that doing something big and bold is a misuse.

Actually, I think it's great to see that somebody like Bill Gates set out as a mission to eliminate malaria from the world. Right. I mean, what a fantastic use of money or to get rid of HIV. I mean, that's a, it's, sure, it's a terrestrial ambition, but what an incredible thing. I took it as a real, I think this is an indelible comment when Bill Gates said, recently that the picture of the world's richest man, Elon Musk, killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one. That actually is a little seam, perhaps, in history, that gets at what I'm writing about here, which is, we don't have to do that. There was nothing about that sentence that

was inevitable. It was purely because Elon Musk came to Washington without knowing the first thing about global health without knowing anything about what USAID actually means in financial terms for the United States or in actual life or death terms for the rest of the world. And he will bear that legacy, no matter whether he gets to Mars or not. All right. So final question, just segueing and making this all about me. What are the obligations of a guest on a yacht? Because one of my observations about wealthy people who have these super yachts is that they need entertainment. And yes, they create their own little world. But of course, their own little world gets quite boring quite quickly and they're stuck with each other. Or they're very, you know,

they're stuck with a group of friends and you're limited to 12 guests, as you said. So there is both a special excitement about going on a super yacht and there is also the special hell of obligation. Yeah. That's true. And actually, you've hit up. something that is not often publicly discussed, but is a fascinating fact of it, which is that if you are invited as a guest on board, get ready to entertain your host. Meaning, if you work in the business of media and culture, you better have some witty stories to tell, and you're going to be doing it three meals a day. Three meals a day. And if you come from Wall Street, it would be wise to be armed with perhaps a relevant bit of information that could be of immediate use. If you work in Hollywood,

you better have gossip with you. You are not there to paddleboard and relax. You are there to perform. And in fact, even that is often not quite enough. There is an entire industry that serves, as one member of it described it to me, as we serve the board billionaires. And what they will do is things like they'll restage the Battle of Midway with the smell of Cordite on. deck and you wear a vest that vibrates like you've just, you know, been attacked by a Japanese plane. And if that's not enough, you can also, this is one of the options that they offer,

is they will fly in a 3D printed restaurant and land it on a sand shelf. And you can eat in that restaurant and then it'll disappear in eight hours so that nobody can ever eat in it again. So it's a unique experience. That's the thing. remember my friend the late writer, A.A. Gill, calling him once to have a chat, and he said, oh, darling, I've just come off a yacht. It's been absolutely ghastfully. I had to sing for my, I was jazz-handsing my way through the entire week. I'm exhausted. I can barely move. And there is a sort of special obligation that comes with being the entertainment. When you're the, when it's your boat, you get to, you get to define the rules. I mean, there was one,

a captain of one of these super yacht said to me, he had an owner at one point who, who used to deliberately limit the number of newspapers on board just to watch the Masters of the Universe, who were his guests, fight over the newspapers in the morning. Is there an enormous amount of competition between the owners of these boats? Because one is mindful of the hubris of Mike Lynch celebrating the end of his court case

and his, whatever it was, eight-year case that the American government had against him, He was a British entrepreneur who had sold his company to HP, and then there were all sorts of problems with it. And he died after a water spout, hit what was the tallest mast, apparently in the world on his yacht. I think the yacht was rented, actually. But nevertheless, the idea of the tallest mast in the world

attracting a water spout, which then kills the people on board. I mean, there is all kinds of Shakespearean dimensions to these stories. I think what attracted me to this as a topic is it's precisely the fusion of the concrete world, the material world, with these ideas about power and need and insatiability. And all of that is made manifest in these machines. And it doesn't happen all that often. I mean, just as a writer, I'm always looking for things like that. There was a great piece in The New Yorker and became a book in the 1960s when John McPhee wrote about orange juice. Simple, orange juice.

But he actually wrote about it as a metaphor for the United States in mid-century because it was all about the innovation that allowed you to have summertime oranges in January in Minnesota. And in a way, I came to see these yachts as a kind of metaphor for now. And then just the final point, the signaling of them. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, in the end, this is, as somebody said to me, these are all ultimately about status anxiety. And I went to the launch of a new yacht. This is a family that had saved up its hundreds of millions and put it down on a new yacht. And what was so fascinating was the CEO of the company that built it for him was already trying to sell them a bigger yacht.

In his speech, he said, welcome to the first step on the big staircase. Oh. Oh. So even as you buy your first big yacht, it's not big enough? Not really, evidently. It's not big enough. But it's a good starter yacht. It's a start of york. Okay, final, final. What was the resolution when, because it was a story that caught fire that Jeff Bezos had a boat that was so big. They were going to have to dismantle a bridge for him to get the boat out of the shipyard onto the sea. And then local people heard about this and said that they would come and they would egg the boat. Yeah. This is in the Netherlands. Yes, because isn't that where the biggest boat, or,

or the most prestigious manufacturer of boats is. Yeah. And the Dutch learned that actually this bridge, which had survived Nazi shelling, would have to be dismantled in order to have the boat brought through. And they didn't like it. And they planned to get together and throw rotten eggs at the boat when it came through. But a solution was found, as it often is,

in the dead of night, which is that they took down the tall masts. of the boat, the company and the owner did, and sailed it through quietly. Maskless. Maskless, in a sense. And then it was brought forth again after it was back out in the open. Oh, thank goodness they found a solution. You know, I do think these little moments,

the most interesting moments for me are when the interior world of the yachts collides with the world of everybody else. and you begin to see how these two can't quite speak to each other. I think there's either John Cleese or Michael Palin once said that the source of all humor is the clash of two reference systems. It's two completely self-contained views of how human affairs shall be. And when they get into conflict with each other, it can be pretty funny. So do you predict more super yachts on the seas? Yeah, I think these things are, until the culture around.

them changes until it becomes seen as a liability for your social media image to be showing yourself on board then the business will continue growing i can't help long for a small group of pirates to take over one of these ships possibly the cora and well just lead the ship off somewhere else well they're in the in the industry they pay attention to one frustrating statistical fact act, which is that as much as it has gone through this extraordinary boom period, it has not actually kept up with the growth of billionaires, that there are, as one designer said not long ago, there are many new tycoons who are not stepping up to the plate. They're hoping that they can encourage them to get in the game.

Well, let's hope they do. Evan Nosnos, thank you so much. I cannot recommend your book. Highly enough. What fun. The have and the have yachts. Oh, thank you. The summer read.

Preferably aboard a yacht, I suppose. Of course, of course. In fact, rather provocative. In fact, anybody that gets invited on a super yacht this summer must take this book with them. A friend of mine who got a copy recently, he messaged me. He said, I was about to bring it with us on spring break. But then I realized that the family we were going with might be sort of yacht curious. And so I'm not sure that they're right to see me reading this.

I love it. Yacht Curious. That's a great phrase. If you have a point of view about yachts or you want to share your favorite summer read, please go on our comments and leave us comment. We do read them all. Don't forget this week, very important, be Beast. And share the podcast with your friends.

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