The Maltese Falcon
If you’re a regular reader of this blog you might know that I currently live in Malta.
As it happens, the Maltese Falcon is registered here and I happened to get a good picture of it when we were in Burgu yesterday. This boat must be the coolest thing floating on water, commissioned by Tom Perkins and finished in 2006. Tom is a long timer of HP and although the Wikipedia article doesn’t detail where he made most of his money his stock in HP is probably a big part of it.
One thing in the Wikipedia article strikes me as possible hyperbole though:
In a radio interview for the BBC World Service’s Global Business programme broadcast in December 2007, Perkins claimed that he personally wrote some of the yacht’s unique control software.
I don’t know, if he did that he must’ve done it sometime in 2004 maybe, at the tender age of 72. Sure he is an alumni of MIT but that was a loooong time ago. The last time Tom programmed anything (before managerial duties started taking too much time) was probably in the sixties using some ancient language or even microprogramming.
Apparently Tom sold the boat last summer to a hedge fund manager in London. A sign of the times maybe when a hard working investor/inventor has to sell the fruits of his labors to a woman who is just playing the markets with the help of proprietary algorithms in order to take advantage of the slower algos used by institutional investors. The boat cost Tom between $150 and $300 million and he sold it for £60 million which is the equivalent of $90 million. Apart from the tragedy of having to sell the world’s coolest boat, the loss is substantial, tough year last year, even for some of the rich…
The boat is lovely though, my picture to the left and a pic I got from Doyle Sailmakers to the right.
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