Mine's Bigger - the World's Largest Yacht

Super Yacht Cup 2007, Palma (Spain). MALTESE FALCON, Design: Dijkstra, 88m. Andrea Francolini Photography http://www.afrancolini.com/

Ciragan Palace in Istanbul overlooking the Bosphorus towards Asia © SW

The sultans would have loved Thomas J. Perkins. And he would've felt right at home with them, at least until he decided to kick some sand in their face when they didn't appreciate his sense of humor.

It was early in the summer of 2006, in Istanbul. On the left bank of the Bosphorus, before the marbled splendor of the Ciragan Imperial Palace, the government of Turkey was sponsoring a feast.

Ciragan was the last palace built in Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire for royal family members. It was an historic location, dating centuries back—the waterfront home of High Admiral Kilic Ali Pasha in the late 1500s—with a commanding view of the strait that separated Europe from Asia, and commanding awe from any vessel passing by.

Ciragan Palace interior opulance © SW

In recent years, Ciragan had become a five-star hotel that the government used to entertain heads of state and other dignitaries. On this resplendent evening, all the culinary trappings to sate a sultan's appetite were present in abundance, though it's a good bet that Suleiman the Magnificent never saw such an ornate fountain of molten chocolate. The wrapped lamb dolma, the charcoal-grilled sea bass, the chicken galantine, the assorted sushi, the baklava—washed down with choice Doluca reds—were to honor an American and his spectacular new sailboat built entirely in a Turkish shipyard just east of the city.

The guest was Perkins, a venture capitalist who had bankrolled the modern Silicon Valley and made it part of the American imagination. If you had an entrepreneurial dream, or if you wanted to strike it rich—or better yet, if you wanted both—you headed for northern California. Over the course of thirty-four years, his eponymous firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had become the Medici of the Valley—the most celebrated money machine in American history that most ordinary folks had never heard of.

Tom Perkins © SW

Perkins's firm funded such nascent companies as Genentech, which gave birth to the biotech industry; Netscape, which launched the dot-com boom; and Google, the darling of the Internet age. In the risky business of providing start-up capital to fledgling entrepreneurs—and backing enough big winners to offset all the losers—Perkins performed the alchemy of turning millions into billions. Almost single-handedly, he transformed the art of venture capital—from the passive hobby of dilettante bluebloods into a cutthroat, hands-on profession that produced a generation of Siliconillionaires. Perkins became the man to see in the Valley. In the process, he had become fabulously wealthy himself and amassed great power. Along the way in his larger-than-life life, he'd managed to be a father figure to Apple's Steve Jobs, sailing mentor to media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the occasional muse to romance novelist Danielle Steel—not to mention being flashed once by Naomi Campbell on a fashion runway and dining with Sophia Loren at his Bay Area home. He even managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France.

Now, at seventy-four, Perkins was setting out to transform the art of sailing. His 130-million-dollar yacht, anchored a few hundred yards out front of the palace, was the Maltese Falcon, a twenty-first century clipper ship that was bigger, faster, higher-tech, more expensive and riskier than any private sailing craft in the world. The Falcon was as long as a football field, forty-two feet wide, twenty feet deep, with three masts each soaring nearly twenty stories toward the heavens. On each mast were six horizontal yards—ranging from forty feet to seventy-four feet in width—to support the sails. The size of the Falcon was utterly out of scale with anything nearby—the ramshackle fishing boats, the tourist ferries traversing the Bosphorus, even the palace. If the ship were anchored in New York Harbor, she'd reach up to the level of the tablet carried in the arm of the Statute of Liberty. The exterior had teak decks, a varnished cap rail, stainless-steel fixtures and exquisitely finished surfaces—attributes of a classic ship—yet the overall look was sleek, metallic and ultramodern to the point of seeming foreboding. If Darth Vader had an intergalactic yacht built for himself, this is what it would look like.

On this day before the Falcon's 1,600-nautical-mile maiden voyage out of Istanbul and westward across the Mediterranean, the Turkish government was paying due tribute to Perkins, whose boat project was a milestone. It had kept hundreds of workers employed for more than a million man-hours over five years, and it had given Turkey's luxury-boat shipyards an international visibility they long craved. The reception was supposed to be hosted by the Turkish prime minister himself, but he was attending the funeral of his brother. Other government ministers, as well as naval commanders, came en masse. Their speeches lauded Perkins and beheld the 289-foot-long Falcon before them. The TV news cameras rolled and the local journalists seemed to write down every word. Even the leader of the political opposition, socialist Deniz Baykal, was a capitalist tonight, for the Maltese Falcon was the toast of the city and the country. 'A lot of people asked me the reason I'm attending this gala,' he said, wine glass in his hand. 'Turkey has a great dynamism. In all sectors, big investments are going on. Yacht construction is one of these sectors. This yacht is a pioneer.'

Now it was Perkins's turn to talk. He already had some sport with the event, unable to resist the chance to tweak both himself and Baykal in particular. The jet-black Falcon was not only all lit up by halogen lights, her fixtures freshly polished and her 16-member crew in dress uniform. Perkins had decked out the square-rigger in full plumage with dozens of signal flags—running from bow to stern, across the tops of the three giant carbon-fiber masts.

Any guest would assume the Falcon was merely festooned with random, colorful pennants. But in the system of international maritime signals, each flag represented a letter. Ever the paragon of capitalism, Perkins's playful message spelled out: 'Rarely does one have the privilege to witness vulgar ostentation displayed on such a scale.' Perkins loved his Falcon—'the Big Bird,' he had taken to calling it, though to some it looked more like a strange duck—yet he was surely aware that some of the locals may have deemed it excessive. To them, he wanted to get in a shot, even if they wouldn't get it since they didn't know nautical-speak.

And then he had a bigger dig, one that everybody would understand. In his brief remarks, delivered with a few well-rehearsed Turkish sentences spliced in, Perkins praised the work ethic of the Turks. 'This yacht will stand up against the craftsmanship of any of the great shipyards of Europe,' he said, wearing a black shirt and his trademark white linen suit from Macy's. 'Some questioned the wisdom of my decision to build the boat here. They said the Falcon was too big, too complicated, too much for the Turks. I was told it couldn't be done to my standards and timetable.' He proclaimed that had the Maltese Falcon been built in Italy—like his two prior superyachts—he wouldn't have been able to set sail for years, given the Italians' insistence on a 35-hour workweek and the month of August off.

But then