Floating among the sardines and seabass of the Mediterranean is a more rare breed of marine species: the superyacht.
With the summer in full swing, billionaires and their nine-figure ships have anchored throughout the European seas — and if their social media posts are any indication, it’s good to be very wealthy and on a very large boat.
In the 12 months ending in 2025, the Mediterranean remained the No. 1 destination for superyachts — roughly defined as yachts over 30 meters long — according to the annual Douglas Elliman and Knight Frank wealth report.
Despite some emerging destinations further East, most of the action is still along the French Riviera, the Amalfi Coast, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands in Spain, per SuperYacht Times’ annual State of Yachting report.
“Corsica and Sardinia are particularly popular destinations,” Anders Kurtén, the CEO of Fraser Yachts, told Business Insider. “We are also receiving, as ever, a huge amount of interest in Greece.”
Whisper, the superyacht Eric Schmidt purchased from Shahid Khan last year, stopped in Monaco earlier this month before making her way to St. Tropez. Magic Johnson, the billionaire NBA player, chartered the yacht, posting videos from the outdoor gym and photos of a toga party on board. (A seasoned superyacht charterer, Johnson also posted a photo of a run-in with billionaire LVMH heiress and Dior CEO Delphine Arnault and said he used to rent her family’s Amadeus yacht.)
Nearby, Larry Ellison’s Musashi stopped at La Spezia, an Italian city known for its yacht builders. Sergey Brin’s new Dragonfly (his second superyacht of the name is bigger, at 142 meters long, than the first) visited Sardinia.
Further east, the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, known for their relative quiet and cultural destinations, are continuing to grow in popularity, according to SuperYacht Times.
Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg traveled the Turkish coast and landed in Greece on their yacht Eos after attending the Bezos-Sánchez wedding in Venice and before flying stateside for the Sun Valley Conference. Von Furstenberg documented their travels, posting about a visit to a ceramic studio in Turkey, snapshots of various thousand-year-old statues in Kos, and a photo of her well-travelled dog on the white cobblestone streets of a Greek island.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Launchpad, in its second season on the high seas, was nearby. Launchpad has been off the coast of Corfu, a Greek Island known for its beaches, since the middle of June, around the time his jet landed in the nearby island of Cephalonia.
One of the most talked-about yachts of the last few years, Jeff Bezos’ Koru, spent the first part of the summer in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Croatia. Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos have visited the country — which has more relaxed rules about the number of guests allowed aboard a yacht — before, in the summer of 2023, when they were photographed walking the streets of Dubrovnik and visiting nearby islands with famous friends like Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, and Usher.
The Adriatic’s proximity to Venice, the site of the couple’s wedding, was likely appealing. The yacht served as the venue for a pre-wedding foam party to celebrate the birthday of one of Sánchez Bezos’ sons before it sailed around Italy.
Some of Bezos and Sánchez Bezos’ wedding guests went west following the nuptials to Spain’s Balearic Sea, which David Geffen’s Rising Sun has been cruising since June. A favorite hangout of the A-list set, the yacht played host to Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, Kris Jenner, and Scooter Braun. Best friends Winfrey and King disembarked on the Spanish island of Mallorca —a hot spot this year, where Jennifer Aniston and Hailey Bieber were also recently photographed — for a coastal hike.
There are still a couple of months left of summer, and yachts will likely remain floating along the Southern European coastline before they make their way back across the Atlantic in time for New Year’s in St. Barths.
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