Battle of the boating billionaires

IT IS the billionaire's equivalent of keeping up with the Joneses. They may be the wealthiest people on earth but that does not stop the super-rich from casting an anxious glance at a new toy parked in the equivalent of the drive next door. But it's not BMW cars that carry bragging power in this world, it's yachts - and yachts on a scale beyond anything ever built before.

They have even had to dream up a new name for them. Once there were just luxury yachts, then came super-yachts followed by mega-yachts. Now, as the next generation of gin palaces the size of small battleships slides down the slipways, the industry has come up with yet another new category. Welcome to the age of the giga-yacht.

If you thought that 11 September put an end to age of seriously conspicuous consumption, think again. Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder and yacht collector extraordinaire Paul Allen finally wrested the size crown for a privately owned craft away from the sumptuous Turkish-owned Thirties yacht Savarona with the launch of Octopus.

This monster, 413 feet four inches long, is said to have such mid-ocean necessities as a cinema and a music studio on board. But Allen, who is the first individual ever to simultaneously own three boats of at least 200 feet in length (the others are Tatoosh and Meduse), may not hold the record for long. Oracle's flash chief executive Larry Ellison is reported to be soon taking delivery of a vessel that is bigger still. There is also talk in the shipyards of a new yacht of similar dimensions being commissioned for Chinese tycoon Chang Yung-fa.

New Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich already owns the world's sixth biggest yacht, Le Grand Bleu, although he also is said to be looking for something more impressive now that the boat is slipping down the world rankings. Le Grand Bleu, often seen in British waters when it was owned a few years ago by - surprise, surprise - Paul Allen, holds the record for the biggest onboard tender, a gorgeous 75-foot Sunseeker motor cruiser that in itself represents an impossible dream for most mortals. The dinghy on the back of Le Grand Bleu's Sunseeker - a boat on a boat on a boat - is perhaps a more realistic acquisition.

With the Americans, Russians and Chinese making the big waves in the world yacht scene, the poor old British fleet is starting to fall far back in the giga-yachts' wake. NCP car parks tycoon Sir Donald Gosling's elegant Leander looked like a motor launch moored next to an oil tanker when it and Le Grand Bleu sailed up the Dart estuary in the summer of 2000.

There is no sign of this extraordinary production line slowing down. About a third of the yachts listed on the world's top 100 by Power & Motoryacht magazine were built since 2000. The explosion in orders for giant pleasure craft is mainly benefiting German shipyards.

Orders have been boosted to almost e2bn (£1.4bn) this year with giga-yachts driving the black ink. Shipyards reported a 20% increase in turnover in the first four months of this year.

The Lurssen yard at Bremen, which built Octopus for Allen, is at the forefront of the giga revolution. 'Lurssen has a solid order book of new projects ranging from 60 metres to over 140 metres, all truly individual statements of design and built in cooperation with a large variety of designers,' says a company spokesman. 'Currently, the total length of yachts being built by Lurssen for US clients alone exceeds the height of the Empire State Building.'

The yard launches Capri, a £35m monster, for a billionaire client next month. Another leading player is the Abeking & Rasmussen shipyard in Lemwerder. It recently delivered the state-of-the-art Zenobia - built in Germany with its interior finished by a team of Parisian architects - for an unnamed Mediterranean billionaire. The cost is understood to have been close to £40m.

What makes this next generation of yachts even more lavish than their superlative-busting predecessors is technology coupled with extravagance. The computers, stabilisers, engines and electronics are state of the art and the workmanship inside reflects more the craftsmanship of a vessel like the old Queen Mary than the latest Disney cruise ship. Marble bathrooms, gold taps, hand-crafted wood panelling, butter-soft leathers, kitchens that wouldn't be out of place in a top London hotel - these are the yachts for the individual who already has everything.

Yachting-industry analyst Helmut Mergen says that the new fleet of luxury yachts is for individuals with egos to stroke and companies specialising in charters for the super-rich in places such as the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

'Security is a high priority among the very rich and they can feel safe aboard vessels that deserve more stars than the best hotels,' he says.

'The very rich trimmed back on all sorts of things a year before 11 September. Now with new tax breaks in the States, a surplus of cash and with a good resale value, the German yards - which always have had the market edge - are racing to build bigger, better and more eye-popping yachts.'

Size does matter when it comes to yachts the dimensions of small battleships. Few European marinas can accommodate such towering vessels. Either there will have to be refits of port facilities at places such as St Tropez or the operators will have to remain at sea while their well-heeled guests travel to the mainland on small motorboats - which, of course, come as part of the package.

Computer nerd's floating magnet

IT WAS perhaps inevitable: halfway through the recent America's Cup championship in New Zealand, a sleek light boat called OneWorld, which was part-financed by Paul Allen, squared off against Larry Ellison's lean black racing machine, Oracle BMW Racing.

Allen's boat lost but it was not clear if Allen was even in Auckland. His other yacht certainly was, however: the 305-foot Tatoosh, the largest luxury yacht in the place, was too big for the harbour with the other boats and had to have its own wharf.

Tatoosh boasts a couple of helicopter pads, a swimming pool and 30 full-time crew, and is said to have cost $100m (£62m). He uses it as a magnet to attract the wealthy, the famous, and the beautiful and throws legendary parties on board.

But although he is slightly richer than Ellison, Allen is no sportsman. His America's Cup bid was made with cellphone entrepreneur Craig McCaw and their stated aim was primarily to draw attention to environmental concerns with the ocean.

Allen is much closer to the archetype of a computer nerd. While Ellison looks trim and fit for his 56 years, Allen, who is roughly the same age, has a somewhat 'full' figure that appears to have been honed sitting on a couch or playing computer games. He fancies himself as a rock guitarist and spent $20m building a rock and roll museum in Seattle as a tribute to Jimi Hendrix.

His competitiveness tends to show itself in the way he buys things. He has, for instance, purchased two entire sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks (football) and Portland Trailblazers (basketball). That, at least, is something Ellison does not own. He also bought his favourite cinema in Seattle and a Boeing 757.

Oracle's Action Man takes thrills seriously

ORACLE chief executive Larry Ellison is the Action Man of the normally nerdy hi-tech industry - almost a caricature of a man's man, out to prove himself in a game of one-upmanship with his fellow billionaires, writes Richard Thomson.

He is at it again this week, flinging his America's Cup racing boat Oracle BMW Racing around San Francisco Bay as he battles Alinghi, the Swiss boat that won the Cup early this year, in a demonstration series in his home city.

Apart from his 250-foot motor yacht, Katana - which boasts a basketball court and an apartment among other amenities - he owns two very serious racing sailboats.

One is Sayonara, which won the infamous 1998-99 Sydney-Hobart race in which several boats sank and six people died in ferocious storms. The other is Oracle BMW Racing, the 80-foot greyhound that came third in the recent America's Cup competition in Auckland, New Zealand.

But while your average billionaire merely owns such toys, Ellison likes to participate. He was on Sayonara as it battled the storms off Australia and he would have been on Oracle BMW during the America's Cup if his skipper had not expelled him because of his famously abrasive personality.

He is highly competitive and changes skippers and crews on his boats at frequent intervals, whenever things don't go perfectly. So far, however, he has not managed to match cable TV tycoon Ted Turner's achievement of winning the America's Cup.

As if these activities were not enough, the thrice-divorced Ellison goes in for other thrills, too. He owns and flies a MiG fighter jet - and once threatened to use it to strafe rival Bill Gates's compound in Seattle.

He broke two bones in his neck and almost died surfing in Hawaii in 1991 and has been fined for flying his $38m (£24m) Gulf Stream V jet into San Jose International Airport during curfew hours.

When flying or sailing becomes a drag, he can turn to his fleet of high-performance cars, all of which are painted gleaming platinum.

And when the action has been sufficiently intense, Ellison can retire to his 22-acre estate by San Francisco Bay, where he has constructed a replica 16th-century Japanese village as a place to relax and contemplate his high-adrenaline exploits.