EOS - Largest Sailing Yacht in the World

Media mogel Barry Diller has been enjoying the largest privately owned sailboat in the world. Eos is a marvel of technology and opulence. With three masts and a triple cutter rig this boat is as fast as she is expensive. Here is a short interview with a weathly man who loves boats.

B.D. I’ve been lucky that I’ve had, coursing through my life—I started with really great people, and how they developed and what’s happened to them continues to make me smile.

L.G. Explain to someone who doesn’t own a car by choice the attraction for you of yachts?

B.D. [Laughs] Well, it really has to do with water, which is either a pull for you or it isn’t. And for me it’s always been something that I can’t intellectualize, and since I’ve been in and around boats all my life, I have an inexplicable love for anything that moves through the water.

L.G. So it starts there.

B.D. Yeah, it starts and ends there. In other words, there’s no more to it than that.

L.G. But you’re purported to own the largest sailing vessel in the world now [the 300-foot-long Eos, for which Diller paid an estimated $200 million to build last year]. What’s that about? I mean, people have all kinds of theories on why rich guys buy big yachts.

B.D. I promise you, it’s not about size, it really isn’t. I mean, it’s not for me. I’ve had sailboats, and when I started to think about building a boat, I wanted to have a boat that had really good sailing characteristics and at the same time I wanted a boat that could hold my family and friends and be as comfortable as I could conceive it. And when we put those things together, it just dictated the length of the boat. It wasn’t backwards, like I said “I want the biggest boat.” It’s inconceivable that I’d say that. And I’m sure that at some point fairly soon I won’t have the biggest boat.

L.G: [Laughs] That's for sure!

B.D.: But I wanted a three-masted schooner. By definition it had three sticks in the air, it's going to be a little large, because that was the kind of sailing craft I wanted. It's not huge, Eos, and as a matter of fact one of the great things about it is its profile is not imposing, certainly not from some big white refrigerator. [Laughs] Big motor boats are usually white, and they're big, they're very imposing. That's not bad, but that's not my sailboat.

L.G.: If you like big white refrigerators!

B.D.: Whatever. Some of them are beautiful. But, you know, in this thing of boats, it's like planes. There's no justification for this, it's just I'm lucky enough that I got to build something that I had more fun than anyone deserves in building it, and now I'm having even more so in me and my family enjoying it.

L.G: Is that it for you, you think, in terms of being happy with this one for a while?

B.D.: No. I'm sure I'll get hungry for doing another boat as well at some point, another stripe of another kind. Once you're in boats, you either go bankrupt or you keep going.