From Bloomberg (via HuffPo), there is a story about a trend among billionaires to buy their own personal submarines:

The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world’s richest people. Journeying to see what’s on the bottom aboard a personal submersible is a wretched excess guaranteed to trump the average mogul’s stable of vintage Bugattis or a $38 million round-trip ticket to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket.

Luxury-submarine makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.

“Everyone down there is a wealthy eccentric,” says Jean- Claude Carme, vice president of marketing for U.S. Submarines Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based bespoke submarine builder. “They’re all intensely secretive.”

Who owns the estimated 100 luxury subs carousing the Seven Seas mostly remains a mystery.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned his boat builder that loose lips sink ships.

Perhaps I am being paranoid, but there may be a trend that it quite troubling here. We have heard about the disappearing frogs and honeybees, but now our billionaires are retreating to the bottom of the ocean…

What do the billionaires know that the rest of us do not? Be afraid…