Tech-industry tycoons at least pay lip service to Calvinist bourgeois ideals, in which capital is to be accumulated, rather than displayed. Until they get on the water. Three of the world's most lavish boats are owned by people from Northern California. Tom Perkins' Maltese Falcon, the high-tech clipper completed last year, is probably the most expensive yacht ever built. Athena, owned by Jim Clark, the founder of Netscape and Healtheon, is even larger: 295-foot long to the Maltese Falcon's 289. And both are dwarfed by the motorized yacht of Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, the 450-foot Rising Sun, so gigantic that its owner discovered it had to use cruise-ship berths. So inconvenient. To give an idea of the scale of Silicon Valley's yacht craze, here's an illustration: to scale, left-to-right, the floating palaces of Perkins, Clark and Ellison. If one laid them end-to-end the three craft would stretch longer than the Transamerica Pyramid on its side.

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