Min är större…

På tal om folk med för mycket pengar… På nattduksbordet just nu ligger boken om Tom Perkins, och hans senaste projekt, The Maltese Falcon. Fascinerande människor. Och en fascinerande båt.

Forbes skriver:

Last year, Tom Perkins made waves in Silicon Valley by resigning from Hewlett-Packard’s board and setting off the scandal that led to CEO Patricia Dunn’s ouster. At the same time, a half world away, Perkins was making waves of a different sort. In Istanbul, he launched his $130 million Maltese Falcon, the largest privately owned sailing yacht in the world. The man, his ego and his boat are examined with insight and precision by David A. Kaplan in Mine’s Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built ($26, HarperCollins, 2007).

The Falcon is indeed a modern marvel. A 289-foot-long clipper, its three freestanding masts mark a revolution in nautical design. Gone are rigging, ropes and wire. Each carbon fiber mast rotates independently and supports five trapezoidal sails. When all five sails are unfurled, they create a seamless wall for the wind. When all three masts are full, the boat’s profile resembles three 15-story buildings standing side by side. Inside, the Falcon is equally impressive. As well as doing away with the rigging, the Falcon’s designers opted to go without a steering wheel. Instead, the teched-out wheelhouse resembles the bridge from the Starship Enterprise. Staterooms, bathrooms and salons are predictably opulent.

Perkins is no less complicated. From humble origins, he excelled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, was mentored by Dave Packard, became a millionaire entrepreneur in his 30s, then revolutionized venture capital with his firm, Kleiner & Perkins. After losing his first wife to cancer in 1994, Perkins took up with romance novelist Danielle Steel. Interspersed in this personal history are stories of Perkins’ enduring affair with the sea. There was the glacier in Antarctica and the brush with the “Perfect Storm” of 1991. Following a sailing accident at a 1995 race in France, Perkins was convicted of manslaughter.

That Mine’s Bigger is as much a biography of Perkins as it is the story of his boat isn’t surprising. Kaplan, a senior editor at Newsweek, is captivated by the kings of Silicon Valley. His first book, The Silicon Boys, featured Perkins in a breezy examination of the men behind the Internet. But if Perkins has a likable side, we don’t see much of it in Mine’s Bigger. Most often he is portrayed as shrewd and calculating in both business and leisure. Just as he shuns Morgan Stanley Ventures after a minor dispute, so he nearly scraps the Falcon project when he and the shipbuilder, who is a close friend, cannot agree on a contract.

Kaplan clearly respects Perkins and his achievements, but he has a hard time liking the man. In the end, so do we. The book’s title is drawn from a Perkins quote and refers to the chummy one-upmanship between him and two other tycoons, who also vie for the claim to the world’s largest privately owned sailing yacht. Kaplan is duly repulsed by garish excess (and is particularly disdainful of James Clark, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, whose schooner, Athena, is second in size only to the Falcon), but he also seems to want to be in on the party. This tension is never resolved, and as readers, it’s unclear whether we’re on board for a cruise or gawking from the shore.

Kaplan is a fine reporter, mining sailing lore to give Mine’s Bigger unexpected depth. A helpful chapter on sailing history is punctuated by a stirring account of 1872’s great tea clipper race between Thermopylae and the Cutty Sark. Even jargony passages on the development of the Falcon’s sails come alive through Kaplan’s understanding of nautical engineering and his evident passion for the sea.

But building a ship is not nearly as entertaining as sailing one, and Kaplan ultimately spends more time in gritty shipyards and geeky design studios than on the open sea. This is a shame. The best moments in Mine’s Bigger come on the water, and after hearing so much about the Falcon and the thrills of sailing it, you can’t help but want to hop on board. (For a look at the Falcon in action, see the 20 seconds from 00:20 to 00:40 of this video).

Mine’s Bigger is a fine way to get to know Perkins and the story of how his big boat got built. But if you really want to get to know the Maltese Falcon, just rent it. Perkins’ yacht is available for charter for about $1 million a week.

På samma tema kan jag också rekommendera “The New New Thing”, där serieentreprenören Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape & Heltheon) bygger sin nya Hyperion i Holland. Han har en idé om att allt ombord skall styras av mjukvara (Seascape), och det är mycket underhållande när sjösjuka indier försöker få ordning på alla buggar under jungfruturen.

Och det enda han pratade om när han fick sin nya båt, var hur nästa båt skulle se ut. Resultatet, Athena, på bilden ovan.