Mine's Bigger by David A Kaplan

Mine's Bigger by David A Kaplan

Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn't to get rich, acquire power, or marry into fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He'd helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006 his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and become Danielle Steel's Husband No. 5.

No, as he hit his seventies, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever--the perfect yacht. His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship--as long as a football field, forty-two feet wide, with three masts each rising twenty stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger--The Maltese Falcon--would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the nineteenth century. But the Falcon is more than a tribute to the past. Gone are all the deckhands to climb the yardarms. Gone is the intricate rigging that helped give the square-riggers of yore their impressive look. Instead, the Falcon's giant carbon-fiber masts are entirely freestanding and rotate by computer. The bridge looks like something out of Star Trek. And the fifteen huge sails unfurl at the touch of a screen. In short, this is a revolutionary machine--the most significant advance in sailing in 150 years.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek's David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat; we meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him; and we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is ever eyeing. In a battle of egos on the high seas, Perkins loves to preen, Mine's better Mine's Bigger On the Falcon's climactic maiden voyage across the Mediterranean--sixteen hundred nautical miles from Istanbul to Malta to the Riviera--we revel with Perkins as his creation surges along at record-breaking speeds.

This is the biography of a remarkable boat and the man who built it. More than a tale of technology, Mine's Bigger is a profile of ambition, hubris, and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur.

David A. Kaplan was a senior editor and legal affairs correspondent at Newsweek for 20 years. While there, he wrote several dozen cover stories on the Court and other topics. Later he was a contributing editor at Fortune, where he wrote long-form profiles of Charlie Rose, Howard Schultz, David Geffen, and Ralph Nader, among others. He is the author of the national bestseller The Silicon Boys; an account of the 2000 presidential election, The Accidental President (on which the HBO feature film Recount was based); and Mine's Bigger, about the largest sailboat in history, which won the Loeb Award for Best Business Book of 2008. These days, he teaches journalism and ethics at NYU and CUNY.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780061374029
ISBN 10	0061374024
Title	Mine's Bigger
Author	David A Kaplan
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2008-07-01
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable