Valleywag
Tech-industry tycoons at least pay lip service to Calvinist bourgeois ideals, in which capital is to be accumulated, rather than displayed. Until they get on the water. Three of the world's most lavish boats are owned by people from Northern California. Tom Perkins' Maltese Falcon, the high-tech clipper completed last year, is probably the most expensive yacht ever built. Athena, owned by Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape and Healtheon, is even larger: 295-foot long to the Maltese Falcon's 289. And both are dwarfed by the motorized yacht of Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, the 450-foot Rising Sun, so gigantic that its owner discovered it had to use cruise-ship berths. So inconvenient. To give an idea of the scale of Silicon Valley's yacht craze, here's an illustration: to scale, left-to-right, the floating palaces of Perkins, Clark and Ellison. If one laid them end-to-end the three craft would stretch longer than the Transamerica Pyramid on its side.
Silicon Valley's weakness
Tech-industry tycoons at least pay lip service to Calvinist bourgeois ideals, in which capital is to be accumulated, rather than displayed. Until they get on the water. Three of the world's most lavish boats are owned by people from Northern California. Tom Perkins' Maltese Falcon, the high-tech clipper completed last year, is probably the most expensive yacht ever built. Athena, owned by Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape and Healtheon, is even larger: 295-foot long to the Maltese Falcon's 289. And both are dwarfed by the motorized yacht of Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, the 450-foot Rising Sun, so gigantic that its owner discovered it had to use cruise-ship berths. So inconvenient. To give an idea of the scale of Silicon Valley's yacht craze, here's an illustration: to scale, left-to-right, the floating palaces of Perkins, Clark and Ellison. If one laid them end-to-end the three craft would stretch longer than the Transamerica Pyramid on its side.
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11:02 AM on Tue Jun 19 2007
By Nick Denton
2,840 views
6 comments
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You forgot Bill Joy's "eco yacht." The ship that launched a thousand and one cleantech ventures. Of course, it's a mere 190 feet. To misquote Steve Jobs, that's the kind of yacht a dentist drives.
nice horizontal phallic visual... very creative, stacking megayachts ;)
i'm serious.
@DaveMcClure500Hats: Hey, thanks, Dave -- we put a lot of thought into our graphics, and rarely get as much as a thank you.
Actually, Hoover Tower would be a better yardstick for Sillycon Valley purposes.
Oh, and Athena isn't really larger than the Maltese Falcon. She's longer, but only because she has a bowsprit. The Maltese Falcon is longer at the waterline, has more beam, and displaces more weight.
At the risk of being a spoil sport for a rant against wealth and excess the Falcon is ground braking and could be an example of how to use sail power for industrial transport into the next century, when all the oil runs out.
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