Zuckerberg’s Team Denies His Yacht Ignored an Alaska Rescue Call

Mark Zuckerberg’s team is disputing a claim that his $300 million superyacht ignored a Coast Guard call for help off Juneau, Alaska. The call went out after a 21-foot skiff carrying two women, a child, and a dog ran out of fuel on August 3, and a small cruise ship ultimately towed it to safety.

The skiff’s crew called for help around 9:30 p.m. The Coast Guard concluded the skiff wasn’t in a genuine emergency and, by about 9:56 p.m., “issued a marine assistance request broadcast” rather than a formal distress call, according to Coast Guard spokesperson Shannon Shepard. 

SOLAS, the treaty governing safety at sea, obligates ships to answer real distress calls, not routine assistance requests like this one. The Marine Exchange of Alaska relayed the broadcast over the radio, and the UnCruise Adventures ship Wilderness Legacy responded, towing the skiff into nearby Farragut Bay and refueling it.

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Michael Love, a passenger aboard the Wilderness Legacy, posted on Bluesky that his ship’s captain announced the Coast Guard had radioed Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht, Launchpad, first, since it was closer, and gotten no response. “There was near unanimous booing when the captain announced this,” Love wrote. 

Alaska Beacon‘s review of vessel-tracking data appears to support the geography of his account, showing the yacht coming to a stop outside Farragut Bay around the same time the Wilderness Legacy turned toward the skiff.

AIS data shows where a ship is and how fast it’s moving. It can’t show what happened on Launchpad’s bridge, and John Hollingsworth of the Marine Exchange of Alaska cautioned that “the AIS snippet you obtained only reveals one of those details.” 

Love has also said the specific claim that the Coast Guard radioed the yacht and got no response came to him secondhand, from what the captain told passengers, not from anything he personally witnessed.

A spokesperson for Zuckerberg said he and his family weren’t aboard at the time, and that the crew found the Coast Guard’s call on a different radio channel than the one they were monitoring. By the time they saw it, the spokesperson said, “the assist was already underway.”