Gabe Newell's dive ship was rebuilt by the yard he now owns

A dragon that was once a scandal

Draak was not built for Gabe Newell. Oceanco delivered her in 2014 as Equanimity for the Malaysian financier Jho Low, and for four years she cruised as a conventional 91.5-metre charter-style superyacht with a helideck, a spa and a beach club. That ended in August 2018, when Indonesian authorities seized her at anchor off Bali as part of the multi-billion-dollar 1MDB corruption investigation, and one of the surviving Commons photographs of the yacht is captioned, simply, as the seized yacht.

Malaysia took possession of Equanimity in 2019 and sold her at auction to the Genting Group, which renamed her Tranquility and ran her as a private and charter yacht for several years. Gabe Newell, the co-founder of the games company Valve, bought her from Genting in September 2023 and renamed her Draak - Dutch for dragon, a nod to the yard that built her. Only after that purchase did Newell go on to buy Oceanco itself.

The owner who now owns the yard

On 1 August 2025, Newell took a majority stake in Oceanco, ending 15 years of ownership by the Barwani family under Mohammed Al Barwani. It is an unusual piece of vertical integration for the yacht-building world: a client who had already commissioned a new 111-metre flagship and sent a second yacht to the yard for rebuild became, mid-project, the owner of the business doing the work. Oceanco's chief executive, Marcel Onkenhout, described the relationship in general terms rather than addressing the ownership change directly: each owner we work with has a different vision, and each project presents us with different challenges.

For any other owner sizing up a yard for a refit or a new build, the arrangement is worth noting rather than copying: Newell's stake gives him a level of visibility into Oceanco's Life Cycle Support division that no ordinary client has, and it means the division's investment in refit capability is now backed by one of its own biggest customers. A yard's aftercare arm is usually a cost centre; here it answers, in part, to the man paying for the work. The same division that reworked Draak also handles routine refits and warranty support for Oceanco's wider client base, so any owner considering a rebuild of this depth is, in effect, drawing on the same team and the same track record Newell used for his own yacht.

Rebuilding a decade-old flagship into a dive-support ship

The rebuild itself was not cosmetic. Draak arrived at Oceanco's yard in 2024, relaunched in February 2026 and was redelivered in June 2026 - roughly two years of work on a hull that was already a decade old. The yard stripped out the helideck, the beach club and the spa and replaced them with a 12.6-tonne jib crane on the upper aft deck, heavy-duty C-davits for launching tenders, a decompression chamber where the spa used to be, and a fully equipped dive centre. The stern boarding platform was extended by roughly a metre, taking her length from 91.5 to 92.8 metres and her gross tonnage to 2,951. Ventilation, electrical systems and core infrastructure were substantially reworked too, since a crane that lifts heavy gear and a dive centre that supports divers underwater both draw far more power, and generate far more heat, than the spa and beach club they replaced.

Naval architecture for the conversion came from Azure Yacht Design and Naval Architecture, with interiors reworked by the German studio Vedder around what survives of Andrew Winch's original 2014 design. Dan Morgan of YTMC, the project management firm representing the owner, said strong collaboration between all parties was needed to re-engineer the yacht's DNA, while Oceanco's Life Cycle Support lead, Edwin Schneider, put it more starkly: on a refit of this scale, everything is interconnected, and every decision had to be carefully evaluated for effects.

A two-ship system: Leviathan and Draak

Leviathan, the new build Draak now supports, is a 111-metre diesel-electric yacht delivered in November 2025 - a beam of 17.8 metres, 4,970 GT, a top speed of 17.6 knots and a cruising range of 6,500 nautical miles. Naval architecture came from Lateral Naval Architecture, interiors from Mark Berryman Design, and she carries a laboratory, a dive centre, an onboard hospital and a 3D-printing workshop built around scientific research and marine exploration rather than entertaining.

The pairing is deliberate: Draak now carries the crane, the extra tender capacity and the heavy-lift gear that a working expedition needs, freeing Leviathan's own lab and hospital to focus on science instead of logistics. Oceanco is presenting the two together at the Monaco Yacht Show 2026 - the first time in the yard's history that it has shown a new build and a refit side by side, and a public statement of intent about what a two-ship Oceanco fleet is for.

What is not published

Oceanco has not disclosed a cost for Draak's rebuild. A single trade report put the conversion above USD 35 million, but that figure has not been confirmed by the yard or by Newell, and no second source repeats it - so it belongs in this story as an unverified estimate, not a fact. Her sale price as Tranquility in 2019 was widely reported at roughly EUR 126 million; what Newell paid Genting for her in 2023 has never been made public.

Leviathan's own guest and crew numbers are reported inconsistently across the trade press - some accounts put her at 12 guests and 43 crew, others at 26 guests and 37 crew - and neither Oceanco nor Newell has settled the discrepancy on the record. Newell himself has given no interview about either yacht or about buying the yard; every quote in circulation, including the two above, comes from Oceanco's own press materials or its project partners, not from the owner.