It’s no secret that Trump enjoys splashing his cash. Whether he’s gold-plating his New York Penthouse or spending millions of dollars on his Presidential campaign, this is a man who knows how to spend money. We take a look at the yachts that Trump’s either commissioned or owned, where money has never been an object.
In 1980, Benetti built a yacht for Saudi businessman and billionaire, Adnan Khashoggi, for $100 million. Originally, this beauty was named after Khashoggi’s daughter, Nabila, and was at the time ranked as one of the largest and most impressive yachts in the world. Of course, times have changed and there are now bigger and better pieces of machinery that will blow everything else out of the water. While it was owned by Khashoggi, it appeared in the Bond movie, Never Say Never Again.
Khashoggi ran into financial problems in the late 1980s when he sold the yacht to the Sultan of Brunei, who in turn swiftly sold it to Donald Trump for $29 million in 1988. After a huge refit, Trump renamed it Trump Princess. As you’d imagine, Trump’s refit wasn’t just adding a couple of deckchairs here and there: the yacht got the full works. A pool on the sun deck, a sauna, a cinema, an elevator, a disco and even a private hospital are just a couple of the amenities that Trump kitted it out with.
The H on the helipad was also replaced by a T to stand for Trump, naturally
Holland-based re-fitters Amels completed the job for near $10 million according, to the LA Times. The H on the helipad was also replaced by a T to stand for Trump, naturally.
In 1989, after the refit was completed, Trump announced to the world on Newsday that he would be building Trump Princess II, and it would be much bigger than Trump Princess – “something in excess of 400 feet long, closer to 500 feet”. In the same breath he said that he would be accepting bids from yacht builders for this project, but it was Amels, the company that completed the refit of Trump Princess, that secured the deal to build and develop the 128-metre Trump Princess II.
One of the designs for Trump Princess II, originally created by Oliver Design
Trump’s commissioning letter to Oliver Design
A year later, in May 1990, it was announced that Trump had actually gone ahead and bought Amels as an entire company. However, the VP of Trump’s investment empire later denied that the shipyard had been sold, due to Trump’s own financial difficulties – the culprit that eventually meant that he had to cancel the construction of Trump Princess II altogether. Two months after the acquisition, that Trump had, in fact, made, he sold Amels to American businessman Peter Kutell. That month, the Trump Princess was put up for sale and work on the Trump Princess II stopped. The next year, in 1991, Trump Princess was sold to Prince Al-Waleed for $19 million who renamed the yacht to ‘Kingdom 5KR’.
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