Wake · Issue No. 01 · Summer 2026

Octopus

Roger Samuelsson, Swedish medtech billionaire (SHL Medical founder), bought her from the Allen estate in 2021 — as of mid-2026 she is fresh from a nine-month Lloyd Werft refit and booked into a May–October 2026 South Pacific charter season at $2.2M/week.

Paul Allen never really wanted a yacht. He wanted a platform — for submarines, helicopters, shipwreck hunts, marine biologists and the occasional rock band — and in 2003 Lürssen gave him one. Octopus, 126.2 metres of battleship-grey steel drawn by Espen Øino, was the largest private yacht in the world when she slid out of Kiel, and she looked nothing like the gin palaces of the day. She looked like a working ship. That was the point.

The spec sheet reads like naval procurement. Ice-classed hull. Two helipads — one forward, a twin pad and hangars aft. Storage for eight tenders. An ROV. Two submarines, including Pagoo, a yellow ten-seater that could sit on the seabed for hours while the Microsoft co-founder watched fish. Twenty-six guests in thirteen staterooms, sixty-three crew berths, a glass-bottomed observation lounge and — because this was Allen, the billionaire who played Hendrix covers — a proper recording studio. Mick Jagger used it in 2011 to cut tracks for SuperHeavy with Dave Stewart, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman. Allen liked to tell the story of conspiring with Bono at one of his parties to coax a reluctant Jagger into singing "Satisfaction". On this boat, that counts as a quiet night.

But Octopus earned her legend underwater. In March 2015, after a search Allen had bankrolled for years, her team found the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Musashi — one of the two largest warships ever built — a kilometre down in the Sibuyan Sea. Allen announced it himself, on Twitter, like a man posting holiday photos. Five months later, at the Royal Navy's request, Octopus recovered the bell of HMS Hood from 2,800 metres in the Denmark Strait — a first attempt in 2012 had been beaten back by weather. The bell was restored and now stands in the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, a memorial to the 1,415 men lost in 1941. Allen took no fee. He considered it a debt owed by anyone who could pay it.

He died in October 2018, and the estate did what estates do. Octopus went to market at €295 million, was trimmed to €235 million, and sold in the summer of 2021 to Roger Samuelsson, the Swedish billionaire behind medical-device giant SHL Medical. Samuelsson did something Allen never countenanced: he put her out to work. For the first time in her life, Octopus became a charter yacht — roughly €2.2 million a week, twelve guests, around forty-five crew, expedition support from EYOS, the outfit that runs the planet's hardest itineraries.

She has not gone soft. Recent seasons have taken her deep into Antarctica — James Ross Island, Anvers Island, charter guests staring at icebergs from a ship that once hunted battleships. A nine-month refit at Lloyd Werft in Bremerhaven saw off her twenty-year survey with a full repaint and new AV and IT, and for 2026 she is working the South Pacific: Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, French Polynesia, May through October.

Most explorer yachts are metaphors. Octopus is the genuine article — a ship that found the dead, recorded the living, and now lets you borrow the keys. Allen would probably have hated the chartering. He would have loved that she's still out there.

The record

• Found the wreck of the battleship IJN Musashi in the Sibuyan Sea in March 2015 — Allen broke the news himself on Twitter.
• Recovered HMS Hood's bell from 2,800m in August 2015; it now stands in the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth.
• Mick Jagger's supergroup SuperHeavy cut tracks in her onboard recording studio in 2011.
• Carries two submarines — including the 10-person Pagoo — plus two helicopters and up to eight tenders.
• Sold by Allen's estate in 2021 to Sweden's Roger Samuelsson after the asking price fell from €295M to €235M; she now charters at ~€2.2M a week.

Photo: Agaran (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons