there is no room for their megayachts

Jeff Bezos has the Koruan impressive sailboat 125 meters long and 70 meters high that cost 500 million dollars. 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 co-founder of Google paid 450 million dollars. Mark Zuckerberg faced his mid-life crisis not by buying one, but by two superyachts that cost him 330 million dollars: Launchpad and 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 seabut 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 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 about up to half a million dollars a year just to have access to the docking space. As if that were not enough, legal conflicts multiply.

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, Let them tell Segovia): the real estate market, infrastructure, 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 Harborwith capacity for boats up to 170 meters long and are also being renovating ports like Palm Beachin 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 like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos move there.

Well, I set up my own port. As collect FortuneKen 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? Your superyacht of almost 100 meters It doesn’t fit on the dock of your mansionso instead of looking for a place, he wants to build it.

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Cover | Wikimedia Commons (Conmat13, Daniel Oberhaus), Goal