BILLIONAIRE FAD: OceanXplorer docked at Wiltonhaven Schiedam/Rotterdam. Pic: kees torn/CC

“WHO pays the piper calls the tune.” The maxim is a familiar one to Marxists, and throughout history, money’s role in guiding and controlling scientific endeavour is powerfully visible.

For hundreds of years, astronomers and other scientists found employment at the courts of monarchs and emperors — Galileo, a court mathematician and polymath, being just one example among many.

Though much of the motivation for the patronage of scientists in this way was for the practical uses of their scientific advancements, there is no doubt that the wonders of science and the benefits of knowledge and education have always been attractive commodities to possess.

And why can scientists be lured in with cold, hard cash? Simply put, science is expensive.

Experimental science requires plenty of space, equipment and the laborious construction of devices and apparatus. And all science, theoretical or experimental, requires considerable time and energy expended by its practitioners. That is the real-world cost of scientific work.

While religious and educational establishments have provided a home for science in certain times and places, it is by no means the norm. The natural philosophers in Britain before the formalism of the term “scientist” were famously the idle rich, who could afford to spend their time simply finding out about things.

Fortunately, for those working in this science, or even scientific education, the application of science for use in technology has been a lucrative relationship.

The technological uses to which science can be put provide scientists with the means to discover more, invent more, and implement their ideas as technology.

Many companies and states that have invested in scientific research have reaped the benefit, and science funding has proliferated in both communist and capitalist societies.

Huge proportions of taxpayers’ money go to paying for the science research that has produced the world’s healthcare, travel, energy and military powers.

The influence of money in science has rightly given rise to scepticism as to whether science is a socially beneficial endeavour. And yet, it has a power that cannot be completely ceded to capital.

Setting aside the creation of technology and technical power, the experience of creative learning and discovery is part of what it means to be human. In the right hands — accessible to all people — science can be of real value to humanity, beyond mere technological or economic development.

It’s perhaps respect due to this idea that saved a suspiciously large boat that docked in central Bristol in early April. The 60m-long yacht, Akula, was the largest to have docked in the Bristol harbourside since 2018, when Bristolians protested an even larger superyacht by attaching banners to the boat.

An estimate for the fuel consumption of a superyacht like this is 500 litres an hour, making it environmental poison as well as a wildly ostentatious display of wealth. But this month, the boat that was parked for two days in the harbour (where Bristolians dumped the effigy of the slavetrader Colston in 2020) and attracted no visible protest from those drinking beers in the sun.

There may be many reasons why, but one of them could be that Akula is painted a sciencey-looking bright red and white, appears somewhat retro, and is kitted out with a large instrument-laden tower, making it look like more like a research vessel, rather than the luxury superyacht that it actually is.  

The ship, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, has a website describing it as a “a luxury private expedition yacht built with innovative technologies” including a lab and offices.

The website links to Augmentum, a Swiss “private charitable initiative” that manages donations to projects “for the alleviation of poverty and natural and cultural conservation.”

If you would like to go on the yacht, and are a scientist at a “university, research lab or NGO,” you can apply to Augmentum to do your research project hosted in the two cabins and the lab of the ship.

The intention is that the boat can be used as a platform for “research in various disciplines including oceanography, marine biology, marine archaeology, geology, environmental sciences, sea physics and chemistry and engineering” as it sails from Bristol up into the Arctic and then to the US and Caribbean.

The same trip, although without details of the scientific ambitions, was also detailed in an interview with the unnamed owner in a luxury yacht magazine earlier in 2025.

On further investigation, this vessel is a symptom of a larger trend in billionaire consumerism. Luxury “research vessels” have started popping up like mushrooms. There’s even a website called Yachts for Science that offers to match up owners of yachts with scientists who might apply to do science on their boats. The website features a photograph of someone who we must assume is a very rich asset-holder joyfully handling a tank containing some kind of sea creature.

The most prominent of the luxury research vessels is arguably the 87m-long OceanXplorer, owned by a finance-billionaire and hosting a helipad, vast labs and control rooms, and two bubble submarines: one for deep-water discovery, the other for filming the first one.

OceanXplorer’s stated aim is to enable scientific discovery — and its dissemination through media content creation.

Superyachts take environmental pollution to extravagant levels. There’s something horrifying about seeing them glamorised as good for the environment because of their contributions to “learning more” about the world’s oceans.

Ocean conservation is popular with billionaires. The irony of their stated desire to “protect” the ocean is grotesque, as is their attempt to cloak their own luxury in scientific endeavour.

Unlike investment in science for its utilitarian outcomes, the modern billionaire is reclaiming the very pleasure of science for themselves.  

Though there are undoubtedly scientists who will be tempted by the opportunity, the patronage of the very rich is a risky business. The interests of those who pay will inevitably warp the subjects that can be studied by those aboard.

Unfortunately for the potent mix of creativity and reality that exists in science, the worlds of the super-rich are too divorced from reality to be of any use to the rest of us.