It was one the most unexpected events of the summer in Mallorca, not only the arrival of Amazon founder multi billionaire Jeff Bezos’s new $500 million yacht Koru in the Bay of Palma on her inaugural cruise on July 19, but also the fact that he and his then girlfriend and now fiancée Lauren Sánchez flew out to the yacht by helicopter, after landing in Palma on board a private jet, to board her and set sail on her for the first time.
However, according to Esysman SuperYachts and publicly available AIS information, Koru apparently spent nearly two months off the radar as she cruised the Mediterranean with a host of celebrity guests on board before returning to Mallorca and then heading to a French shipyard a few weeks ago.
Bezos’s movements were made public by images posted on social media platforms by some of the guests and snaps caught by members of the general public when he and his guests went ashore in many of the Mediterranean’s most luxurious destinations - but that was the only way his movements were known as he spent all summer on board his new luxury yacht, the second-largest schooner in the world.
Koru’s $75 million Abeona support ship was spotted off various ports, but she was not always close to Koru.
Two weeks ago she was in Palma’s Club de Mar.
With a net worth of US$125 billion as of April 2023, Bezos is the third-wealthiest person in the world and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021, according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.
Koru is a luxury custom superyacht. The vessel was built in the Netherlands by Oceanco starting in 2021, and delivered in April 2023. It is a three-masted sailing yacht 127 meters (417 ft) long and reported to have cost $500 million or more. When commissioned, the yacht was the second-largest sailing yacht in the world, after Andrey Melnichenko’s Sailing Yacht A.
What is AIS in yachting?
The acronym AIS stands for Automatic Identification System.
It is used by ships, pleasure boats and traffic control stations. The system allows information on the position of nearby ships and shore stations to be exchanged electronically.
A ship’s crew may turn off its AIS broadcast for a variety of legitimate reasons, but this behaviour may indicate that a vessel is hiding its location and identity.