Mine's Bigger: The Extraordinary Tale of the World's Greatest Sailboat and the Silicon Valley Tycoon Who Built It » (Reprint)

David A. Kaplan is a senior editor at Newsweek. He is the author of The Silicon Boys, a national bestseller that has been translated into six languages. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, various Op-Ed pages, Parenting, and Food & Wine. A graduate of Cornell and the New York University School of Law, he lives with his wife and two sons in Irvington, New York.

As the dominant venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, Tom Perkins had seemingly done it all—from amassing a billion-dollar fortune to getting himself convicted of manslaughter in France. But his ultimate dream was to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever built.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, bestselling author David A. Kaplan takes us inside the mind of an American genius and behind the scenes of an extraordinary venture: the birth of Perkins's $130 million marvel The Maltese Falcon. This modern clipper ship is as long as a football field and forty-two feet wide, with three rotating masts, each twenty stories high, and a bridge straight out of Star Trek. The riveting biography of a remarkable ship and the remarkable man who built it, Mine's Bigger is an unforgettable profile of ambition, hubris, audacity, and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

“Inspired.”

Prologue: Making Waves     1
Killer Instincts     11
The New Old Thing     25
Westward Bound     45
Prophets and Profits     67
Hull Envy     93
Ego Trips     119
Going Overboard     141
Testing the Waters     157
Dream Boat     177
Luxurious Machine     189
Yachties     211
Mine's Bigger, Mine's Better     229
Epilogue: The Flying Dutchman     247
Note on Usage     253
Acknowledgments     255
Sources and Bibliography     259
Index     263