Ricardo Aruajo, a travel planner who designs specialty trips for the ultra-wealthy, said he has been approached multiple times about planning deep-sea trips for wealthy clients, who often back out when they realize the planning and danger involved. Asked if he had any advice for people looking at getting into subs, Allen said: “You better have a few bucks.”īut making it to the ocean floor takes more than just wealth. A good pilot can cost up to $100,000, a great pilot costs even more. Many of the boats are so heavy they require a crane to put them in the water and a large garage or superyacht to store them. While the big manufacturers are working on more affordable prototypes (read: about $1 million), owning a submarine is still a wealthy person’s game. In a headline announcing Dalio’s investment last year, Curbed proclaimed: “The Status Submarine’s Time Has Come.” The late billionaire Chris Cline is reported to have kept one on his superyacht hedge fund manager Ray Dalio is such a fan he invested in Triton and started his own submersible exploration company, OceanX. Venture capitalist Tom Perkins owns a submersible, as does Norwegian fishing billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, and the aforementioned Mateschitz. Erik Hasselman, commercial director for U-Boat Worx, previously told The New York Times that cruise ship adoption was a catalyst for industry growth, saying it “changed the general perception because it’s big business-if a cruise company is doing something, then it must be proven and foolproof.”Īnother major driver: wealthy individuals like Allen, who purchase the vessels as additional tools in their already bursting fleets.

A growing number of cruise ships and resorts, such as Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz’s Laucala Island, offer private tours as bonuses for their guests. The uses of these private subs range from tourism to scientific exploration to cinematography. Kohnen stressed that these vessels, unlike the doomed Titan, were tested and tried by third-party assessors-a process known in the maritime world as “classing.” He compared most private submersibles to an FAA-approved airplane: “You can’t just build something in your garage and say, ‘Here’s a submarine, go and do great things,’” he said. Competitors of the company owned by Kohnen and his brother, Hydrospace Corporation, have sprung up to meet demand among the most prominent are Florida-based Triton Submarines and the Dutch company U-Boat. Kohnen estimates there are some 200 private, non-military submersibles in the world, about a quarter of which were made in the last decade. All of that has changed since the turn of the century.

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