NOTE: Earlier this month, YouTube took down the original version of this video due to claims about copyright infringement. Rather than do battle with the YouTube overlords, we are publishing it here. We have edited the video so that it only includes photos from Wikipedia, my own work, or images covered by the fair use doctrine. I’m publishing the video here on Substack because this platform is a godsend for independent journalists like me who are striving to do hard-hitting reporting — a rarity in today’s media landscape, which is increasingly controlled by billionaires like the ones I’m writing about here. Laurene Powell Jobs owns The Atlantic. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Michael Bloomberg owns Bloomberg Media. And Mark Zuckerberg, of course, owns Meta/Facebook. In addition to the newly edited mini-documentary, I’m also publishing the entire voice-over script, with links to many of the sources we used to make this video.
Abstract:
Yacht-Zee$ shows how mega‑billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Michael Bloomberg are bankrolling radical climate activist groups while living like Saudi princes. It tallies the kilotons of CO2 pouring out of their superyachts and private jets and follows the money from their foundations to the NGOs that, among other things, want to ban your gas stove. This mini-doc (8 minutes and 43 seconds) shows how elite climate “philanthropy” has morphed into a luxury‑branded weapon in the energy class war.
Script/Voiceover:
Jeff Bezos owns a yacht that’s so big, it has its own yacht. That’s right: Incredible as it sounds, Bezos’ megayacht has a yacht. I’ll give you details on Bezos’s boats in a minute, but remember this number: 7,000 Tons.
Superyachts like the one Bezos owns, produce about 7,000 tons of CO2 per year just sitting on standby — that’s equal to the emissions of 1,400 average residents of the planet.
Why should you care? Well Bezos has given nearly a billion dollars to climate groups who are lecturing the rest of us about carbon emissions. And in 2025, his foundation launched a $27 million effort called the “low methane livestock initiative.”
Right. Bezos’ yacht has a yacht, but he wants to cut cow farts.
Unfortunately, the Amazon oligarch isn’t the only yacht-owning billionaire who wants the rest of us to cut our emissions. So let’s look at some of the biggest offenders — billionaires who’ve turned climate activism into a personal brand while living like Saudi princes.
Let’s start with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder.
He owns a 387-foot, $300 million super yacht called Launchpad. And like Bezos, Zuck’s yacht has a yacht. Zuckerberg’s support yacht, is known as U-81. It is 262-feet long and cost $100 million. It has its own helicopter, a hangar, dive center, and of course, extra diesel fuel for the mother ship.
Which is fitting, actually, because with these people, there’s always another yacht, another mega-mansion, another private jet, another press release about how much they care about the environment.
So why does this matter? Well, Facebook says it is “committed to helping solve the climate crisis.” Zuck himself has said climate change is “one of the most important challenges of our generation.”
And there’s this: over a 9-month period beginning in 2024, Zuck’s yachts burned more than 2 million liters of fuel. That’s nearly 530,000 gallons. Put another way, that much fuel would fill the tanks of 44,000 Honda Civics.
44,000!
So file Mr. Facebook under the heading of “billionaire who really really cares about the environment...terms and conditions apply.”
Next up: Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow and a titan of the climate philanthropy industrial complex.
In 2021, she pledged to spend $3.5 billion on climate change issues. What does Jobs do in her spare time? She plies the oceans in a $120 million, 256-foot long superyacht called Venus. This is the same woman, who, in 2023, she said climate change “needs to be addressed like a speedboat.”
Jobs has a $120 million superyacht but she’s talking about a speedboat.
Since 2022, a group she helped create, called Climate Imperative, has shoveled over $250 million to climate NGOs in the US, including $36 million to the Rocky Mountain Institute and $70 million to the Sierra Club — the radical groups leading the push to ban gas stoves. So while Jobs cruises around on her yacht, she’s funding the goofballs who are aiming to ban your gas stove in your kitchen.
Then there’s Michael Bloomberg, the centi-billionaire and former mayor of New York who really, really, cares about climate change.
Bloomberg is the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions. His foundation claims to be “at the forefront of U.S. and global efforts to fight climate change.
This the same foundation, by the way, that is giving $1 billion to the “Beyond Carbon” campaign, which aims to close all the coal plants in the United States, block all new gas-fired power plants, and force the US grid to run almost solely on weather-dependent sources like wind and solar.
That’s a perfect recipe for blackouts.
In 2025, Big Mike claimed “The American people remain determined to continue the fight against the devastating effects of climate change.”
That’s pretty rich coming from a guy who reportedly owns 12 houses and three jets. But as far as I can tell, no yachts.
So we’ve talked about Zuckerberg, Jobs, and Bloomberg, but the king — the undisputed world heavyweight champion of climate hypocrisy — has got to be Jeff Bezos his oneself.
Bezos’s yacht is called the Koru. It’s 417-feet long and cost $700 million. And because it’s so comically oversized, Bezos had to buy another yacht to tend to the mother ship. The Abeona is 246-foot-long and cost $100 million. It carries jet skis, a helicopter (of course) and whatever other crap won’t fit on the big boat.
Why should you care? The Bezos Earth Fund, says it is “transforming the fight against climate change.”
Remember, a superyacht produces about 7,000 tons of CO2 per year. Bezos has two of them. So, we’re talking 14,000 tons annually just from Bezos’ boats, that’s equal to 2,800 average residents of the planet. But wait, there’s more. The Bezos Earth Fund also bankrolled a $100 million project to use satellites to monitor the oil industry’s methane emissions.
So Bezos is giving millions to monitor other people’s emissions while his yachts are pumping out CO2 equivalent to thousands of regular people. And of course, this doesn’t include the soaring emissions coming from Amazon, which emitted more than 68 millions tons of CO2 in 2024.
The foolishness at work here is so thick you could cut it with Laurene Powell Jobs’ speedboat.
Again, why should you care? Why should you care that these billionaires are massive hypocrites? Well, follow the money.
Groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Rocky Mountain Institute. Sierra Club. Natural Resources Defense Council, and other climate activist outfits are getting massive grants, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars per year from these same type of billionaires, to push energy policies that — conveniently — don’t have any impact on their billionaire benefactors.
Furthermore, the billionaires get tax write-offs for giving money to their foundations, who are in turn, funding these climate groups. That means regular taxpayers, people like you and me, are, in effect — in a round about way — subsidizing the billionaires’ pet climate causes while the billionaires themselves are laying around on their yachts.
One final point: and this is from Oxfam, The richest 1% of the world’s population is producing about as much CO2 as the 5 billion people who make up the poorest two-thirds of humanity.
The richest 1% — as much CO2 as the poorest 5 billion.
When I hear that figure, what comes to mind is my friend Joel Kotkin’s book, and the idea of what he calls “neo-feudalism.” The billionaires are funding climate NGOs to reduce CO2 emissions, it screams, as Kotkin says, of neo-feudalism.
For these billionaires, funding climate activist groups has just become another front in what I believe is an energy class war.
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I’m Robert Bryce. Thanks for watching. See ya.
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