[Image: Lidija Jakovljevic / @superyachtsfromabove / Instagram]
When you’re Jeff Bezos, buying toys doesn’t really involve checking the price tag first. And when those toys happen to be floating palaces, the numbers get properly ridiculous.
The billionaire Amazon founder owns not one but two superyachts – the elegant sailing yacht Koru and its support vessel Abeona. Together, the pair are estimated to be worth somewhere between $575 million and $600 million. Dare we put those figures in rands? R9,4 billion and R9,8 billion.
Yes, that’s already a jaw-dropping figure. But oddly enough, the purchase price isn’t the part that makes yacht owners wince. The real financial sinkhole is keeping these monsters running.
Let’s start with Abeona. Even though it plays the role of the “support” yacht, carrying helicopters, toys, crew and probably the occasional billionaire logistics problem, it’s still eye-wateringly expensive to maintain. The annual cost of keeping Abeona in tip-top shape is comparable to buying an entire fleet of supercars every year.
And then there’s Koru. Running that yacht each year costs roughly the same as snapping up a penthouse in New York annually. Casual stuff, really.
For all the headlines it’s generated, Koru isn’t actually the biggest yacht on the planet. Not even the biggest sailing yacht. Those bragging rights go to Azzam for overall size and the intriguingly named Sailing Yacht A for sailing yachts.
“Sailing Yacht A”, because apparently someone ran out of yacht-naming ideas that day, stretches about 144 metres (469 feet), which makes it roughly 15 metres longer than Koru. However, despite being larger, it was actually a little cheaper to build.
So Bezos didn’t even buy the biggest one. He just bought one of the most expensive ones. Classic billionaire move.
There’s a quiet rule in the superyacht world: expect yearly operating costs to hover around 10% of the yacht’s purchase price.
Koru, which was launched by Oceanco in 2021, reportedly cost about $500 million to build. Do the maths, and you land at roughly $50 million a year (R818 million/year) just to keep everything running. And that bill stacks up fast.
The yacht’s complex three-masted sailing system alone requires constant specialist attention. Then you add crew salaries, fuel, supplies, and technical upkeep. As for insurance for a $500 million floating asset? That’s estimated somewhere between $2 million and $5 million annually (up to R81,9 million). Then come the mooring fees, and let’s be honest, Koru isn’t exactly squeezing into the local fishing harbour between two dinghies.
Add it all together, and the yearly running cost hits about $50 million. Break that down further and you’re looking at around $140 000 per day (R2,3 million). Which, in case you were wondering, is enough to buy a very decent supercar… every single day.
But for Bezos, it’s just the cost of keeping the world’s most extravagant sailing machine ready to cruise.
[Source: Supercar Blondie]
