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Image of massive 200-foot-vessel sparks outrage online: 'Too much money'

"What is the point?"

"What is the point?"

Photo Credit: Reddit

A Redditor sparked outrage online after posting an image of the world's largest single-masted sailing yacht, complete with an airplane parked on board. 

Posting to the r/megalophobia subreddit, the Redditor shared an image of the 246-foot megayacht. According to the post's title, the image showed the massive vessel docked in Charleston. 

Photo Credit: Reddit

"Yes that's a full-sized plane it has on it, and, yes, the boat next to it is actual size," the Redditor captioned the image. 

Redditors rushed to the comments to express their outrage and disbelief. 

"Oligarchs have too much money," said one commenter

"What is the point of having a plane on deck?" asked another

The original poster identified the megayacht as the M5, formerly known as Mirabella V.

According to Boat International, the M5 is owned by Rodney Lewis, a Texas-based billionaire who made his fortune in the oil and gas industry.

Lewis has a net worth of $1.2 billion, according to Forbes

In addition to owning the world's largest single-masted sailing yacht, Lewis is also an avowed aviation enthusiast. 

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"I fly helicopters pretty routinely, like a pickup truck," Lewis has said, per Forbes. "I drive very little."

The M5 measures in at a whopping 75 meters, or about 246 feet, three-quarters the length of a full-size football field, per Boat International.

In recent years, megayachts have come to represent the over-the-top conspicuous consumption of the billionaire class, as well as their outsized environmental impact. 

Analyzing the sailing records of 23 billionaire-owned superyachts, Oxfam found that each yacht on average produced 6,239 tons of heat-trapping pollution every single year. 

"It would take the average person 860 years to emit the same pollution," Oxfam said.

The solution, according to Oxfam, is to force the ultrarich to pay for the pollution they produce rather than spreading those costs across the rest of humanity. 

"Across the UK, fair taxes on the use of private jets and super yachts could raise up to £2 billion [$2.72 billion] a year for climate action and incentivise those who use them to stop," Oxfam said on its website. 

For the most part, Redditors seemed to agree. 

Citing that the M5 at one point had been rented out for $420,000 per week, one Redditor commented, "The fact that people can spend this much per week as disposable income is the best example of eat the rich."  

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