Onlooker shares photo of mysterious vessel anchored offshore: 'One of our overlords'

A zoomed-in video of a massive yacht floating in the San Francisco Bay posted on the r/sanfrancisco subreddit has caught the attention of Bay Area residents. The photo, posted to San Francisco's forum on Reddit with the title "Who/What Yacht is this in the bay today?" brought about speculation and jokes about luxury yachts in a city that faces immense income inequality.

According to commenters, the vessel appears to be Mogambo, a 239.5-foot superyacht reportedly owned by Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp.

Mogambo sails under the Cayman Islands flag, and users tracked down a MarineTraffic link that confirmed the yacht's presence in the city at the time of posting.

According to Forbes, Koum has an estimated net worth of $17 billion, and he made his fortune after he sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for around $22 billion. This is not Koum's only superyacht; Luxurylaunches reported that he has commissioned another $220 million superyacht named Moonrise, which comes with an additional "support" yacht.  

In the Reddit thread, one user recalled working at Koum's post-acquisition celebration years ago: "Katy Perry played for a room of like 120 people. Johnny Walker Blue Label on the bars. Oysters, caviar, the whole nine. It was simultaneously fascinating and super depressing being a worker in a room where every attendee had become a millionaire basically overnight."

Large yachts like Mogambo can release thousands of tons of carbon dioxide annually. The Guardian reported that one super-yacht similar to Koum's can release as much carbon pollution in a year as 1,500 cars. The richest 1% are responsible for roughly 16% of worldwide pollution, according to Oxfam, which dubs these super-consuming billionaires as "pollutocrats."

To make matters more stark, San Francisco's wealth gap is among the widest in the nation; tech billionaires live alongside a population where nearly one in eight residents lives below the poverty line, according to city data. 

One person in the comments drew attention to the contrast between San Francisco's working class and the technocracy, responding that the yacht belongs to "one of our overlords enjoying the fruits of our labor! Have fun at work today!"

Another commenter joked about the yacht sighting by saying that the poster "spotted too much money." The only way to get people to change their behavior to be more planet-friendly is to hold them accountable, and these Redditors sure knew how to do that.

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