Poor Tom Perkins; the IRS won’t let him show off his yacht. The Google venture capitalist, Rupert Murdoch sailing buddy, and Danielle Steel ex No. 5 has spent the past five years building the world’s most mega megayacht: the 289-foot-long, $130 million Maltese Falcon. He wants to show it off here, but can’t. “He desperately wants to anchor it in New York Harbor and have all of us behold it, especially his rivals on Wall Street,” says David Kaplan, who just wrote a book about the boat. The Cayman Islands–registered yacht charters for $440,000 a week, plus a half-million in staff, fuel, dockage, and supply costs, making it a multimillion-dollar business. “The problem is,” says Kaplan, “he risks several million dollars in taxes if the boat enters U.S. waters.”

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Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Arianne Cohen
• Table of Contents: Jul 16, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!