Vitalik Mocks 3AC’s Yacht Buy, Spreads a Thoughtful Message

Vitalik Buterin throws some shade on the rumors of Su Zhu and his $50 million yacht purchase. In one of his recent tweets, the Ethereum co-founder shed light on the ethics of the rich spending money on extravagance.

I want to make our world more like the Yudkowskian dath ilan utopia where instead of rich people’s desire for wealth signaling going into wasteful zero-sum crap, it goes into supporting public goods.

Here, he is referring to the parallel earth called Dath Ilan, which is a fictional world created by the writer Eliezer Yudkowsky. He stated that in this utopia, rich people would invest their money in supporting public goods instead of wasteful zero-sum waste goods.

The conversation started when rumors spread about Su Zhu purchasing a $50 million yacht to impress investors despite his present financial turmoil.

Buterin asserts that spending $50 million “to impress others” may be done in “much more honorable ways than buying a superyacht.” A better choice, according to him, would be to join the Gitcoin grants, a fundraiser for web3 startups.

Buterin was also in favor of giving Gitcoin benefactors “huge, gorgeous sculptures in the metaverse” to celebrate their contributions. Circling back to Su Zhu’s alleged $50 million yacht purchase, the crypto Twitter community has provided various insights on the topic.

On Twitter, there are several stories about the yacht. @FatManTerra says that though Su Zhu used the yacht purchase to show off to investors, the yacht was actually bought with borrowed money and that Su Zhu was unable to proceed with further payments for it.