What’s the point of having a superyacht if you’re forced to share it with some unwashed poors?
That’s the calculation the crew of a Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, apparently made on the billionaire’s behalf, after a skiff near its location in southeast Alaska ran into trouble.
According to the Alaska Beacon, a small cruise ship called Wilderness Legacy had to go out of its way to help the crew of a 21-foot boat that had run out of fuel outside Farragut Bay, a body of water south of Juneau. As maritime events go, it’s a pretty common occurrence — Dan Blanchard, the owner of the cruise line told the Beacon that these types of rescues don’t even “always rise to my attention.”
What did catch attention was the fact that Zuckerberg’s yacht had been much closer to the stranded skiff than the cruise ship. So much so, in fact, that the Wilderness Legacy had to steam “around and past” the Launchpad on its way to render assistance, the Beacon reported.
“There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Michael Love, a passenger aboard the cruise ship, said in a post on social media.
There are a few caveats here: for starters, the US Coast Guard says the skiff issued no official distress call, only a generic request for assistance. There’s also the tidbit shared by a spokesperson for Zuckerberg, who insisted that the billionaire was not personally onboard the yacht at the time.
As for why it didn’t respond to the call for assistance, the spokesperson told the Beacon that “by the time the crew reviewed the Coast Guard contact on a different radio channel from the one they were operating on, the assist was already underway.” In other words, the official story is that the crew on Zuckerberg’s unfathomably expensive yacht, which you’d assume was loaded with state-of-the-art communications equipment, simply didn’t notice the call for assistance.
Whether you buy that tale probably depends on how much latitude you’re willing to offer Zuckerberg, who has quickly become one of the more identifiable villains of the tech billionaire world. Regardless of his actual involvement, the Meta CEO was almost universally panned for the event on social media.
“Perfect mirror of how billionaires leave the entirety of society stranded,” one Redditor commented.
As Love, the cruise passenger, told the Beacon: “frankly, if I was Mark Zuckerberg I would be absolutely ecstatic at a chance to do something helpful for someone in need and maybe get some good PR out of it.”
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