When you live in Seattle, you see more than a few multi-million dollar yachts come in and out of the Puget Sound over the course of a summer. We have our fair share of millionaires and billionaires around here thanks to the tech scene, and they love boats as much as they love private planes and second homes.
So when a giant yacht rolls into Seattle, it usually doesn’t make the news. Except when a Russian oligarch’s yacht made its way into the area back in 2024. Oh, and except that yacht was seized by the US government thanks to an international operation.
But last week, there was a stir about a superyacht, and the mood turned from exciting and fun to anger and frustration quickly.
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On May 20th, Meta announced that they were laying off about 1,400 employees from the Seattle offices.
On May 26th, a superyacht was spotted in Seattle.
That $300M superyacht belonged to Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg.
One thousand four hundred people lost their jobs, yet when they took their kids to school, picked up coffee, or drove to the unemployment office, they got to see Launchpad, the 387-foot, black-painted, sleek yacht, less than a nautical mile or two from the Seattle Meta offices.
Now, you might say, “Scott, he’s a billionaire, he can do what he wants with his boat.” To which I would reply, sure, he can, but he shouldn’t.
I assume that once you get into that stratosphere, you start to lose touch with reality. I assume that once your net worth crosses over the GDP of Iceland, and eventually climbs past Croatia, and eventually Ukraine, you start to lose touch with the cost of daily life.
You forget that some of your employees live on a budget. You forget that some of your employees were in the middle of big family decisions when they got the notice on May 20th. You forget that the decisions you make as CEO and as an executive team have such a huge ripple effect.
Zuck is a made man. He built Facebook into what it is today. Meta is worth almost $2T. You can once again argue that he can do what he wants.
The thing is, he can do what he wants. But he should have more awareness.
If I were a Meta employee who got served a notice for layoff with some standard package based on years of service, and then a few days later I saw this yacht cruising around almost mocking me, I would lose my mind.
I guess I hold people to a standard to think about their people, to care about their employees, and to be sensitive to what is going on with them.
The reality is, I know layoffs happen. Businesses make decisions. People get caught up in the middle of it. Companies go through reorganizations. The list goes on.
I’m not saying Meta shouldn’t have laid anyone off, because that’s too utopian in this day and age. What I am saying is that someone, somewhere, should have just tapped Mark on the shoulder and asked, “Hey, where’s that little boat of yours at the moment?”
Timing matters. Optics matter. Awareness matters.
Maybe the answer was docking it somewhere else.
Maybe the answer was simply having enough awareness to realize that while one group of people was worried about mortgage payments, healthcare, school tuition, and what they were going to tell their families next, another group was watching a floating symbol of unimaginable wealth cruise through the same city.
This isn’t even really about yachts if we’re being honest. This is about understanding the emotional climate around you. It is about recognizing when people are hurting, stressed, scared, or uncertain, and having enough emotional intelligence to move accordingly.
Great leaders don’t just manage revenue and strategy. They manage energy, morale, trust, and perception. The higher up you climb, the more your actions become amplified, even the ones that feel insignificant to you.
I think sometimes people forget that employees are human beings long before they are headcount on a spreadsheet.
They have kids, marriages, bills, anxiety, pride, fear, and dreams attached to those jobs.
So while the yacht itself isn’t the issue, the disconnect is. The lack of sensitivity is. The inability to read the room is.
Sometimes leadership is not about what you can do. It is about understanding what you probably shouldn’t do, especially when everyone around you is still trying to recover from the impact of your decisions.