"No Mistah Bond, I expect you to dive!"

Welcome back to the future of our end times.

It’s reassuring to know that in our fabulous go-go fin de siècle polycrisis with billionaires drowning in excess wealth, a madman with the Ernst Stavro Blofeld adjacent handle of Christian Gumpold, is proposing to join their ranks by drowning them for real.

Christiano, as chief executive of a Graz-based super-yacht design firm, has surely stolen a head start on his Goldfingered fever dreams simply by basing his super-yacht design firm in Graz, which sounds exactly the sort of snow-frosted chocolate-castle supervillain hamlet likely to offer generous tax breaks to these sorts of shenanigans.

But with runaway hubris inflating the basic table stakes for billionaires from simply owning everything to ruining what’s left of it so that they die with all the toys and win, Herr Gumpold’s meisterwerk is to offer the billionaire who thinks he has everything something they obviously don’t because nobody does yet; an underwater luxury mega yacht bigger than a Vanguard-class nuclear submarine. Indeed, it would arguably be better than a Vanguard-class nuclear submarine because although both are submersible, the Vanguard merely costs billions of tax dollars, while Gumpold’s ‘M5’ submersible super yacht can actively evade billions of tax dollars by stealthily drifting into international waters at the end of each financial year.

The luxurious absurdity of the underwater oligarch’s ultimate bathtub toy—with room for jet skis, two six-person mini-submarines and a helicopter—is hardly absurd at all when one considers the number of lowly prime ministers and impecunious national treasurers one could squeeze into the 36-seat glass-walled dining room to offer them panoramic views of your terrifying trained marine carnivores chewing on other, less cooperative prime ministers and treasurers.

There is something about such obvious Bond villain accoutrements being crossed with the shopping list of someone who's simply too rich to be sensible that screams of existential megalomania. Or perhaps that screaming is just the EU finance minister who introduced the 15% minimum multinational tax rate being devoured by Elon Musk’s genetically engineered megalodon.

Musk is the obvious target market for this three-billion-dollar indulgence. Or at least he would be if he hadn’t pissed away forty-plus billion dollars indulging himself in sinking Twitter to the bottom of the ocean floor. It would doubtless frustrate the poor fellow to the point of brain-spasming rage should some other billionaire come to own the submarine meme space, especially on a luxury submarine big enough for twenty passengers, forty crew and the woman with the biggest vagina in America.

Reason enough to hope Ernst Stavro Gumpold gets to build this thing.

The other reason, of course, is to distract the billionaire class from their current obsession with racing to build off-world colonies on Mars and across the Asteroid Belt as a sort of plutocratic brave new world where edge lord alpha bros and their dinosaur-vaginaed Barbarella brood mares will reign as Gods over the lumpenproletariat by means of their monopoly control of the oxygen and soylent green supply.

If they are going to destroy the world to squeeze out the last few pennies worth of untaxed shareholder value, the least they could do is stay here and die, screaming, with the rest of us as the oceans boil away around their submersible superyachts.