Beyond the status symbol

I’m pretty sure that that’s a large part of it. If it weren’t, the race to have the largest and most expensive yacht wouldn’t be such a thing.

I guess it’s an isolated environment with controlled access, so you don’t have to deal with paparazzi or whatever.

considers

I guess you’re only subject to the laws of the flag state. I don’t suppose that that matters much for Russian oligarchs.

There are a couple laws in the US where the US will still assert extraterritorial jurisdiction over its citizens, even if they’re in territory normally outside of US jurisdiction. One of those is child sex tourism – and it looks like a similar thing is done by the EU and UK – so you can’t just go out on your yacht and have sex with twelve-year-olds to your heart’s content. But for most other stuff, I believe that as long as you select your ship’s flag carefully, it’s probably more-or-less outside the law for most purposes. For some people, that might be rather significant.

Vice has a video on it.

https://youtu.be/KjpnObVhKpg?si=okTva9gw2w6mukFa

Apart from what others have said. If they pick a different country to fly their yachts flag, they get a lot less regulations. They can hire people from poor country 1, sail around, and if the yacht needs maintenance in a port on another country then they can just fire everyone and leave them stranded in a different continent.

Traveling in luxury around the world and being able to go into international waters where laws don’t apply for everything else I suppose

I want one because I really like swimming in pretty places, being really comfortable lounging in the sun and sleeping at night, and also going to new places all the time. I can only pick two of the three at any time without a yacht. I don’t need a mega-yacht for that, just a nice 60 footer.

For billionaires, though, it’s so they can avoid laws while doing bad shit.