Wake · Issue No. 01 · Summer 2026

Dubai

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai — still his royal yacht, active and regularly seen off Palm Jumeirah and Port Rashid; no ownership change reported as of mid-2026.

Every great yacht needs one owner. Dubai needed two, and the first one is the cautionary tale.

In 1996 Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei — finance minister, brother of the Sultan, and the most committed spender the luxury industry has ever billed — commissioned a 162-metre colossus from Blohm+Voss and Lürssen, with Andrew Winch on the pen. This was the man whose existing yacht was called Tits, with tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2. Project Panhandle was to be the crown of the fleet. Then the money stopped. Jefri's Amedeo conglomerate imploded, the Sultan seized his brother's assets amid claims of roughly $15 billion gone missing, and the hull — launched bare in June 1998, superstructure half-formed — was left sitting on a covered floating dock in Germany like an unpaid bar tab in steel.

Enter owner number two, who does not do unfinished business. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was at the time turning a modest Gulf port into the world's most improbable metropolis, and a decade-dead German hull suited the project. Dubai's government bought her in 2001, tried a Turkish contractor, lost patience, and handed her to Platinum Yachts FZCO — a Dubai World outfit run by Kostis Antonopoulos, who put some 800 workers aboard and later summarised the brief with admirable economy: the owner wanted "a floating Burj Al Arab."

He got one. Delivered in 2006 at 12,488 gross tonnes, Dubai was the largest private yacht on earth — a title she held until Abramovich's Eclipse arrived in 2009, and at fourth-longest in the world she has aged with unusual grace. The split-level owner's deck crowns eight decks of unapologetic maximalism: a mosaic swimming pool laid in handmade tiles threaded with fibre-optics, a circular staircase of colour-changing glass steps built in Germany, a cinema, a disco, a dining room for ninety, and a helideck stressed for a 9.5-tonne Blackhawk. There is a garage for a submarine. There is, per the delivery inventory, a lobster tank. Forty-eight guests, 88 crew, 26 knots flat out, 8,500 miles of range — numbers that still embarrass most of what has launched since.

The owner's own ledger is not unblemished, and he has never pretended the world's opinion keeps him up at night. In 2020 London's High Court found he had orchestrated the abduction of two of his daughters; in 2021 it ordered him to pay Princess Haya £554 million, the largest settlement in English legal history. He paid, kept the Godolphin horses winning, and kept building. The yacht never blinked.

She has never chartered and never will — Dubai is a royal yacht in the literal, working sense, flying the UAE flag with the ruler's crest on her bow, holding station off Palm Jumeirah or alongside at Port Rashid where the tourists photograph her from the promenade. Estimated cost: around $400 million, though the number is almost beside the point. Jefri ordered her as an ornament to excess. Sheikh Mohammed finished her as a statement of intent — and twenty years on, the statement still reads clearly from a mile offshore.

The record

• Began in 1996 as Blohm+Voss/Lürssen "Project Panhandle" for Prince Jefri of Brunei — abandoned as a bare hull in 1998 when the Sultan seized his brother's assets.
• World's largest yacht at delivery in 2006 (12,488 GT); held the length title until Eclipse in 2009 and remains the fourth-longest afloat.
• Her helideck is rated for a 9.5-tonne Blackhawk, and the garage holds a submarine.
• The pool is laid in handmade mosaic tiles embedded with fibre-optics; the German-built spiral staircase has colour-changing glass steps.
• Some 800 workers at Dubai's Platinum Yachts FZCO finished her — the owner's brief was "a floating Burj Al Arab."

Photo: Imre Solt · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons