Jeff Bezos has the Koru, an impressive sailboat 125 meters long and 70 meters high that cost him $500 million. It sounds huge, but it falls behind if we talk about the superb Dragonfly of Sergey Brin, a 142-meter-long megayacht for which the Google co-founder paid $450 million. Mark Zuckerberg faced his midlife crisis by buying not one, but two superyachts that cost him $330 million: the Launchpad and the Wingman. The three have several things in common: plenty of money, at least one luxury boat and a mansion in Florida. and a little problem: they don’t fit in the dock.
First world problem. We knew that Jeff Bezos’ sailboat is so big that it has already had space problems that almost led to having to dismantle a historic bridge to take it out to the open sea, but in Florida it does not fit in any marina in the area, so the solution offered by the authorities after not being able to put it in Port Everglades has been to park it next to the oil tankers after not being able to put it in Port Everglades.
The big names from Silicon Valley and Wall Street are moving to Florida and bringing with them a nautical competition to see who has the biggest… yacht. Authentic floating mansions. However, the Sunshine State does not have enough docks to accommodate fleets of such caliber: moorings are a scarce commodity, prices are skyrocketing (we are talking prices of up to half a million dollars a year just to have access to docking space. As if that were not enough, legal conflicts are multiplying.
Why is it important. Beyond the obvious excesses of the rich, what lies behind it is a geographical redistribution of American economic power: the ultra-rich are abandoning California and New York to concentrate on a coastal corridor that goes from Miami to Palm Beach.
And when such an amount of wealth reaches a territory, everything becomes tense (and if not, tell Segovia): the real estate market, the infrastructure, the services. The ports are just the tip of the iceberg: the saturation of the docks shows that not all the money in the world can Buy something that does not exist: more space to dock your ships.
There is no room for one more rich person. Miami has several deep water moorings for larger vessels, such as Island Gardens Deep Harbor, with capacity for boats up to 170 meters long, and ports such as Palm Beach are also being renovated in 2022. They are not enough. There are two drivers behind this migration of economic elites:
- Donald Trump’s presence at Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago has turned Palm Beach into the new epicenter of power in the United States. Being close to the president is always a strategic incentive for businessmen.
- Taxes. While Florida does not have a state income tax, California instead plans to vote in the fall on a wealth tax on the richest, which has caused celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to move there.
Well, I set up my own port. As reported by Fortune, Ken Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel and resident in Florida for three years, obtained permission in November to build a private port in Miami Beach with capacity for nine boats, an art gallery included and space for 300 guests. The reason? His nearly 100-meter superyacht doesn’t fit on the dock of his mansion, so instead of finding a place for it, he wants to build it.
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Portada | Wikimedia Commons (Conmat13, Daniel Oberhaus), Meta
