If you've been to San Diego in the last year, you might have spotted a massive yacht called the Amadea docked offshore. It belongs to a sanctioned Russian oligarch and was seized by the U.S. government in 2023.
The issue is that as the government struggles to sell the Amadea, it must maintain it — and superyacht maintenance isn't cheap. In fact, as The Washington Post reported, taxpayers are shelling out $7 million a year to maintain the enormous, abandoned craft.
One person, unable to wrap their head around those staggering numbers, sought insight on the r/AskEngineers subreddit.
"Why are large boats so costly to maintain even when not in use?" they asked. "The yacht is supposedly sitting idle and not burning any fuel or accumulating wear on its parts, yet they spend enough money to buy a Learjet 45 every year on it. … How is that a $7 million operation?"
One person joked: "Lots of Senators and Congressmen need to check it periodically to make sure the money is being spent efficiently. The only way to do that is a long weekend at sea."
Other engineers chimed in quickly with less cheeky explanations.
"Sitting in an ocean is probably one of the most hostile places on earth. … It's a constant battle of cleaning, polishing, scraping, and protecting," someone wrote. "Plus, you've got a few huge diesel motors, diesel generators, a million water pumps, air conditioning units, and on and on and on. I can tell you right now the majority of this is employee cost for a full time crew. The second majority is on contract labor (divers, mechanics, HVAC, etc)."
One person offered criticism in addition to the cost breakdown.
"Keeping a car running costs money/labor and parts. [Ships are] complicated and bigger, more expensive labor and parts," they said. "Scale that to apartment building scale and multiply it by saltwater exposure. It's a ridiculous thing to build in the first place, a cruise ship."
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Never 👎 Indeed, while these superyachts and cruise ships are impressive in size, many people have grown critical of them for their environmental impact and resource use. Superyachts generate such high levels of planet-warming emissions that lawyers have proposed codifying their use as "ecocide" — on par with genocide in relation to the health of the planet itself.
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