$75 million yacht owned by tech billionaire spotted in San Francisco Bay

Some people arrive in the Bay Area by car or plane. Others, like Whatsapp co-founder Jan Koum, make larger waves.

The Ukraine-born billionaire’s superyacht was spotted in the San Francisco Bay on Tuesday, with its presence confirmed by ship-tracking website MarineTraffic.org. It’s a monstrous ride: Named “Mogambo,” the custom-built ship is more than 240 feet long and sold to Koum for $75 million in 2012, Luxury Launches reported. 

A 2022 article said the yacht holds 17 crew members after upgrades to the ship’s interior. The boat can also sleep up to a dozen guests, and goes almost 20 miles-per-hour at top speed. Per a yacht-chartering website, there’s an onboard elevator and a swimming pool, plus several “toys” available for use, including four jet-skis. The site says the yacht is available for charter — just 600,000 euros a week! — in various Caribbean locales.

For now, “Mogambo” is floating between San Francisco and Oakland. Koum, whose messaging company sold to Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, has strong ties across the Bay Area. He spent millions of dollars assembling a five-property compound in Atherton in the 2010s, Variety reported, and recently donated $1 million to bring a light system back to the Bay Bridge, as SFGATE learned earlier this month.

Koum is also bringing his thick wallet into local politics, after staying out of campaign finance records for San Francisco’s 2020 and 2022 elections. In November, Koum donated a whopping $250,000 to Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie’s campaign for mayor, per a filing by the political action committee, Believe in SF, Lurie for Mayor 2024. The PAC has already paid for pro-Lurie billboards and mailers in the city, some of which bear Koum’s name.

The PAC’s filing listed Koum’s location as Santa Clara, and his occupation as “retired.”

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