The Boss of You

It’s Fri­day, so I’m tak­ing a tangent.

As some of you are aware, there is a par­tic­u­lar breed of busi­ness book to which we are itchily, madly aller­gic, and that is the type we refer affec­tion­ately to as the Dude on a Yacht book.

The Dude on a Yacht book promises a life of lux­ury, usu­ally via a photo of a smil­ing (or fiercely star­ing into the cam­era, for extra butch points) white guy enjoy­ing the leisure his entre­pre­neur­ial efforts have bought him. Often it’s a CEO biog­ra­phy, though not always. Dude on a Yacht books may be good, bad, or indif­fer­ent; really, their defin­ing fea­ture is a com­bi­na­tion of aspi­ra­tional cover art and a title that promises insights into how to access the inner cir­cle of priv­i­lege occu­pied by the world’s most finan­cially suc­cess­ful busi­ness­men. A few exam­ples are shown at left.

Emira and I have chuck­led over a lot of these cov­ers and enjoy a good exam­ple when we find one (so feel free to send us your favourites!). But… I think I may have found the ulti­mate Dude on a Yacht. And he’s not on the cover of a book.

Well, actu­ally — he is. But it’s not a very sexy look­ing book, and I don’t think I’d file it in the above-mentioned cat­e­gory. How­ever, the dude in ques­tion (Paul Allen, that is, of Microsoft fame) owns the world’s largest pri­vately owned yacht, named “Octo­pus,” so I feel like he deserves a spe­cial mention.

I mean, check out these specs:

Octo­pus cost Allen over US$200 mil­lion and has Per­ma­nent crew of 60, includ­ing sev­eral for­mer Navy Seals. It has two heli­copters, seven boats, a 10 man sub­ma­rine and a remote con­trolled vehi­cle for crawl­ing on the ocean floor.

There’s so much  more in this slideshow, it will sim­ply blow your mind.

He should really get him­self a fresh photo shoot for his book cover, stat.

[Edited to add: Thanks to the friend who pointed out that this post would not be com­plete with­out the offi­cial Dude on a Yacht video…]