Billionaire Jeff Bezos made headlines in 2019 during a rare appearance when he attended a party on US business mogul David Geffen’s Rising Sun yacht, along with former Goldman Sachs executive Lloyd Blankfein and model Karlie Kloss.

Four years later, Bezos is no longer the CEO of Amazon, and he’s spent the last few months earning a new title: King of the Sea. As the 2023 yachting season comes to a close, it’s clear that Bezos’ new $500 million superyacht has won this summer.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez are the king and queen of the 2023 yachting season. They were spotted posing on Bezos’ new superyacht Koru in Portofino (left) and making a stop in Ibiza. Photo MEGA/GC ImagesMany of the world’s rich and famous have tried to avoid being spotted vacationing on yachts. Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav. Discovery made that mistake earlier in the season, sparking backlash after hosting a lavish gala on a French Riviera yacht, just weeks after the Hollywood writers’ strike began.

But Bezos and his superyacht guests seemed undeterred by the news about their trip.

Bezos named his superyacht Koru, after the Maori symbol of growth (perhaps a reference to the world’s largest sailing yacht at 417 feet long) and new beginnings.

Jeff Bezos goes shirtless on the Koru yacht. Photo from Lauren Sanchez’s InstagramKoru made her first trip to Gibraltar in April and a series of photographed stops followed. In May, Bezos posed shirtless with his fiancee Lauren Sanchez, who resembles a sculpture, on the bow of Koru’s ship. The two went on a cruise off the coast of Spain before going to the Cannes film festival.

In June, Koru traveled to the Italian Riviera, where the couple posed for photos on the deck of a ship. The superyacht then stops at the Italian island of Capri, before heading to nearby Positano, a cliffside town that has become a favorite of celebrities and travel influencers.

There, the yacht was the site of Bezos and Sanchez’s engagement party, which reportedly attracted guests including Bill Gates, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Ari Emanuel and Leonardo DiCaprio. Just a week later, the couple was seen out and about in Dubrovnik, Croatia with Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry and Usher.

Runner-up of the yachting season: Eos by billionaire Barry Diller

Another highlight of this year’s cruise season is the 305-foot Eos, owned by billionaire Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, which also had a busy summer crossing the Mediterranean .

Eos, owned by Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg. Photo Horacio Villalobos/Getty Images

A key part of the superyacht season, Eos’ summer 2023 itinerary includes an early stop in Mallorca, where Diller and von Furstenberg hiked with Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King; a trip to Greece, where von Furstenberg visited with British Vogue editor Edward Enninful and Valentino co-founder Valentino Giancarlo Giammetti; and a stop on the Amalfi Coast, where von Furstenberg posed for photos with Kris Jenner.

von Furstenberg posed for a photo with Kris Jenner. Photo from Instagram

In August, the ship arrived in Croatia, where its owners dined with Hollywood A-listers Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson and Jason Blum, as well as Diane Sawyer and Creative Artists Agency partners Bryan Lourd.

The Eos docked in Venice to end the summer, where von Furstenberg hosted the annual DVF Awards and began furnishing one of her land-based residences.

Not far from the Venice harbor is Giorgio Armani’s yacht, Maìn, on which he welcomed guests such as Sydney Sweeney and Kerry Washington as part of the One Night Only fashion event earlier this month.

Many of the world’s other famous superyachts – and the people who frequent them – appear to have stayed out of the public eye this summer.

A longtime superyacht employee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, recently told Insider: “In a world of long-lens paparazzi, there is a place for privacy.” comfort that many of us take for granted.”

That could be the privacy Geffen is enjoying on the Rising Sun, the yacht where Bezos was photographed a few summers ago, and Geffen also used the Rising Sun as an epic quarantine spot in March 2020 when the epidemic raged. In the world.

Although the ship hasn’t received much attention this cruise season, according to newspapers, it has been spotted in Capri and Mallorca, although there was no famous entourage on board. Most recently, the cruise ship made a splash in an often unknown place: Portland, Maine, which attracts visitors with some of the world’s most expensive crafts.