Revolut CEO buys €350M superyacht after finding owner via ChatGPT

Nikolay Storonsky, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Revolut, bought a €350 million superyacht in January 2026. The yacht is called Nixie, it stretches 102 meters, and it has a 25-foot glass-bottomed infinity pool and a cryotherapy chamber. The detail that will follow Storonsky to every tech conference for the next decade, though, is this: his team found the seller using ChatGPT.

That revelation came out in London’s High Court, where luxury yacht broker Cecil Wright & Partners Ltd. is suing Storonsky for what it claims is a €17.5 million commission it is owed for facilitating the deal. The case became public in early August 2026, with the ChatGPT angle surfacing in court filings on September 16.

How a €404M yacht deal ends up in court

Cecil Wright & Partners was first brought into the picture in October 2024, when the firm introduced Nixie to Storonsky’s family office. So far, standard luxury asset brokerage. Then the ownership history got complicated.

Nixie was originally commissioned by Patrick Dovigi, a Canadian businessman and former NHL player. Dovigi sold it to a Brazilian buyer, who was subsequently arrested for fraud. That legal turbulence pushed the yacht back to Dovigi before it eventually found its way to Storonsky.

According to the broker’s account, Cecil Wright was sidelined somewhere in that tangled chain of ownership. After the firm’s involvement ended, Storonsky’s team needed to locate the yacht’s then-current owner to proceed with a direct purchase. Rather than hire another intermediary or dig through corporate registries, they typed their query into ChatGPT.

It worked. The purchase closed in January 2026 at €350 million, roughly $404 million at the time, with Nixie delivered around June 2026.

Cecil Wright argues that none of that matters. The broker’s position is that it introduced the yacht to the buyer, the buyer bought the yacht, and a 5% commission on the sale price is therefore owed. That 5% on €350 million lands at exactly €17.5 million. Storonsky’s legal team disputes the claim entirely, arguing the broker was not the effective cause of the eventual transaction and that its commission claims have no basis. The case is ongoing.

What this means for high-value asset deals

The Cecil Wright lawsuit is narrowly about one transaction and one commission dispute. But the legal question at its center, specifically whether a broker who introduces a buyer to an asset retains a claim to commission if the buyer later completes the deal through a different channel, has broad implications.

The Dovigi-to-Brazilian-buyer-to-Dovigi-to-Storonsky chain is a good example of the kind of ownership complexity that can invalidate what seemed like a straightforward deal mandate. If the asset changes hands, the seller changes, and the buyer’s team has to independently locate the new seller, the original broker’s claim to a fee becomes genuinely contested legal territory.

For Storonsky personally, the case is a reminder that buying a €350 million yacht is not just a transaction, it is a paper trail. Revolut reached a valuation of $45 billion in a secondary share sale in 2024, and Storonsky’s personal wealth has tracked the company’s rise closely. A €17.5 million commission dispute is, proportionally, a rounding error on the asset itself.

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