The savviest billionaires tend to practice their own kind of frugality, but that doesn’t mean they don’t spend unfathomable amounts of money on stuff. Sometimes that stuff is exactly the sort of stuff you’d imagine an absurdly wealthy person would splurge on. Sometimes, it’s a little outside the billionaire box.
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Let’s consider four of the wildest things billionaires have bought. One of them is particularly out there.
Roman Abramovich: A 550-Foot Superyacht
In itself, the idea of a billionaire owning a superyacht is not particularly outstanding. But get a load of the superyacht owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has a reported net worth of $13 billion. Eclipse, his supreme sailing machine, measures 550 feet long and is worth more than $590 million. Not only does it have the typical superyacht features like a swimming pool, a dance floor, a massive dining hall, it’s nearly apocalypse-proof. It has an onboard anti-missile defense system, laser shield, escape pod, submarine and three helicopters.
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Richard Garriott: A Part of the Moon (Sort Of)
This is the particularly wild one — though it’s a bit difficult to explain as it’s not a tangible buy and a bit of a stretch. Richard Garriotta, a pioneer in the video game industry, a commercial spaceflight industry trailblazer and astronaut-adventurer who has in the past been identified as a billionaire, paid $68,500 in 1993 to purchase both the Soviet Union’s Luna 21 lander and its Lunokhod 2 rover, both of which were active on the moon in the 1970s.
“I purchased Lunokhod as an object that is still sitting on a foreign celestial body. So, it’s the first time an object was sold that is not on the Earth,” Garriott once said. He also owns the trackway — about 25 miles — that the rover moved along.
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia: A Custom-Built Jumbo Airbus
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, a Saudi business mogul, venerated investor, philanthropist and member of the Saudi royal family, boasts a reported net worth of $17 billion — and based on at least one of his purchases, he’s all for spending some of it on wild luxuries. In 2007, Prince Alwaleed signed the sale agreement for a custom-built A380 superjumbo, the largest passenger plane model ever built. The plane, dubbed “Flying Palace” cost $310 million. It can seat up to 850 people, but hauling hundreds of folks around doesn’t seem to have been Prince Alwaleed’s priority. The plane was customized to include a boardroom, cocktail bar, gym and even a jacuzzi.
Bill Gates: Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Codex Leicester’
Bill Gates is the wealthiest billionaire on this list, with a net worth of $117 billion — and though the tech mogul practices frugal living, his version of frugal living doesn’t much resemble ours, at least, not when you look at some of his luxury purchases, such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Codex Leicester,” which he scooped up in 1994 for $30.8 million. The “Codex Leicester” is a 72-page manuscript containing Leonardo’s sketches and scientific writings. It was created between 1506 and 1510. Few thinkers/artists/inventors/tech visionaries are as celebrated for their prescience and genius as Da Vinci, whose findings and forethought continue to hundreds of years later.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: The Most Outrageous Things Billionaires Have Bought (That You’ve Never Heard Of)
