October 28, 2012: More than a year after Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ death, the luxury yacht he commissioned launches from a shipyard in North Holland. It’s the world’s first look at Venus, the distinctive-looking yacht that was one of Jobs’ big personal projects during his final years.
As Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson, “I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”
Sadly, Jobs never lived to see the finished vessel.
Steve Jobs’ yacht Venus launches
Steve Jobs spent his career turning aesthetics and minimalism into a business philosophy, stripping products down until every curve, button and material felt like perfection. One of his final design projects took that obsession out of the Apple Store and onto the open water.
The 256-foot superyacht Venus, created with celebrated French industrial designer Philippe Starck, featured a sleek aluminum hull, enormous glass walls and a wheelhouse lined with seven 27-inch iMacs. It cost approximately $120 million to build, but the boat’s most revealing detail wasn’t its price tag — it was that Jobs kept refining the design while battling the illness that would ultimately kill him in 2011.
When Venus finally launched in October 2012, a year after his death, it became an unlikely monument to the Apple co-founder’s belief that even the most personal objects deserved the same relentless attention to detail as the Apple products that changed the world.
The yacht was the product of six years of design and construction work. Despite the Apple co-founder’s vast fortune, many who knew him personally were surprised that such a project would appeal to him. Even Jobs himself denied desiring such a craft.
“There’s no yacht in my future,” he told journalist John Markoff in 1980.
As Jobs later told Isaacson, however, the yacht represented something: a confidence that he would be able to overcome his health troubles. He began working on it around 2008, just prior to a successful liver transplant that extended his life as he battled pancreatic cancer.
Designed by Philippe Starck
The design of Steve Jobs’ yacht proved somewhat divisive. Although Philippe Starck designed it, the luxury vessel bears Jobs’ and Apple’s fingerprints. Jobs recruited the chief designer of Apple’s retail stores to create a special glass for the yacht. And while on board, the owner could control the Venus via a row of 27-inch iMacs.
“As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist,” Isaacson wrote. “The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accouterments. 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.”
Before the launch could happen, however, the ship suffered a setback. Authorities impounded it in an Amsterdam port due to an outstanding payment owed to designer Starck.
Steve Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, attended the October 28, 2012, launch of the yacht. (So did his children, who used the yacht in the years since.) To show their appreciation to the Dutch shipbuilders who brought the Apple leader’s vision to life, the Jobs family gave each of them an iPod shuffle engraved with the name Venus.
In July 2024, Steve Jobs’ yacht made headlines again when it drifted into a larger ship called the Lady Moura, owned by Mexican businessman Ricardo Salinas, off the coast of Naples, Italy. According to Boat International, damage to the two incredibly expensive yachts was “minimal and cosmetic.”
See where Steve Jobs’ yacht is now
Want to know where Steve Jobs’ yacht is right now? You can keep tabs on Venus’ location around the world using data from VesselFinder or ShipSpotting.com.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Today in Apple history: Steve Jobs’ yacht launches — without Steve”
Sweet boat, but as an Islander (Living in a marine community) I can say – it is not meant for bad weather….
Coastal waters, good weather….
Long NeXT owner who personally knew SteveJobs and sailor who sees his ship as a cube mausoleum floating on a long coffin with surround viewing platforms…only “one more thing”, is his vision — he left for you to see and experience onboard.