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You know it is springtime in London not by the arrival of swallows or the sprouting of blossoms, but by the printing of the annual Sunday Times Rich List. This is a sort of league table for the superrich, a survey of the British wealthscape that decrees who comes out on top usually steel baron Lakshmi Mittal. In publishing this list, The Sunday Times has made the acquisition of extreme wealth into a spectator sport. But being rich has always been a competitive business.
We live in strange times. On one side the wheels are falling off the world economy; food and oil prices are shooting up while property values head in the opposite direction. Yet at the other end of the socioeconomic seesaw, the big issue occupying some intelligent minds this summer is whether their superyacht is big enough.
According to Philippe Lamblin, the silver-tongued CEO of Privatsea, which sources large boats for people with large bank balances, the threshold for superyacht status used to be 30 meters. Today that is not nearly enough to keep status-obsessed plutocrats from feeling inadequate. Lamblin recalls joining the cruise of one of his clients and putting in at a harbor in the Mediterranean next to someone he knew; the problem was that the boat they were berthed beside was 55 meters some 20 meters longer than the one...