The superyacht designed for Steve Jobs is now free to leave Amsterdam after the Apple co-founder’s estate paid an undisclosed sum to settle a dispute with the French designer Philippe Starck.


The yacht was impounded after Starck contacted the Dutch bailiffs claiming he had been underpaid by around €3 million for his work on the design of the vessel.

Starck’s lawyer, Gerard Moussault, told the AFP: “A security deposit was paid into a bank account, but I cannot say for how much.”

“The captain is waiting for better weather to set sail,” he added.

Jobs worked with Starck on the aluminium-hulled superyacht in the months before his death but there was reportedly no contract between them.

Starck’s lawyer in the Netherlands, Roelant Klaassen, explained that Jobs and Starck were “very close in the period that the design was made and the building proceeded…

“That’s one of the reasons there was no formal agreement on the job,” he said, speaking to the AFP.

In November Starck explained what it was like to design an ‘Apple superyacht’.

“Definitely we are always speaking about this idea, this philosophy of the minimum, but on one side you have an electronic product and on the other a boat, a big boat.

“It’s something else. It is a Steve Jobs work,” said Starck. “It is not like a lot of megayachts showing the vulgarity of money. It’s a boat showing the elegance of intelligence.”

Venus will now be delivered to the United States where Steve Jobs’ family, including his widow Laurene Powell Jobs and their three children Reed, Erin and Eve, will take charge of her.