The yacht Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs envisioned after returning from a 2007 cruise from Italy to Turkey should be free to go after a payment dispute with French designer Philippe Starck has been resolved.
According to a French newspaper report yesterday, the yacht has been cleared to leave the port in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where it was detained by authorities over unpaid fees. The 80-meter aluminum craft nick-named ‘Venus’ had been docked in the harbor since December 8…
According to French newspaper LeMonde, the Steve Jobs family made an unspecified security deposit to release the mega yacht, which is loaded with seven iMacs.
“A solution has been found and a security has been lodged on a bank account for the boat to be free to leave”, lawyer Gérard Moussault who represented Jobs’ heirs told the paper.
Agence France Presse wrote that the estate of Steve Jobs and Philippe Starck had settled out of court. The security deposit guarantees Starck an unknown portion of the sum he thought the estate owed.As we reported, Venus was originally projected to cost 150 million euros, or $198 million. Starck was set to receive six percent in compensation for his design work. That would have amounted to nine million euros, or approximately $12 million, if the craft’s worth hadn’t later been re-evaluated at 105 million euros, or $138.7 million.
Jobs and Starck “trusted each other, so there wasn’t a very detailed contract”, Reuters reported last week.
Be that as it may, authorities chained the craft to the dock over the payment dispute and “port service companies have been instructed not to help it to leave”, DutchNews wrote Friday.
According to Steve’s biographer Walter Isaacson, the late Apple CEO wanted a “sleek and minimalist” yacht akin to Apple’s products.
“I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat”, Jobs told his biographer, “but I have to keep going on. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die”.
“The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements”, Isaacson wrote in his bio book. “As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high”.
Steve had even gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support.
The mega yacht is surely gonna make for a nice Christmas present for Jobs’ widow Laurene and three of their children, Reed, Erin and Eve.