Founder, Bridgewater Associates · Co-founder, OceanX
b. 1949 · OceanX founded 2018
“I believe that ocean exploration is more exciting and more important than space exploration.”
OceanX launch announcement, 2018 (CNBC).
M/V OceanXplorer
Ray Dalio runs the world's largest hedge fund and has spent his second career trying to get the world to look at the ocean the way it looks at outer space. In 2018 he and his son Mark, with James Cameron as a founding partner, launched OceanX — the most ambitious privately-funded ocean exploration program ever attempted. Their first vessel, the 56-metre Alucia, helped capture the first-ever footage of a live giant squid and the first-ever footage of a great white shark with David Attenborough's Blue Planet II crew. The follow-on vessel, OceanXplorer, is an 87-metre former offshore-support ship rebuilt at Damen as a floating research-and-production studio carrying two submersibles, a helicopter, ROVs, wet and dry labs, and a 4K broadcast facility.
Dalio Philanthropies has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to ocean science, conservation and climate. OceanX vessels work in close partnership with national marine research bodies (NOAA, the Saudi Red Sea program, the Bahamian government and others) and explicitly publish their findings into the scientific literature and into documentary television — Dalio's view being that ocean exploration only matters if non-scientists can see what was found. Dalio also funds the Dalio Center for Sustainable Investment Research and has spoken publicly about the ocean as a stranded climate asset — one we cannot afford to ignore.
M/V OceanXplorer (87 m) — Damen-built former offshore-support ship, refit 2021, currently the most capable private research vessel afloat. M/V Alucia (56 m) — the predecessor vessel, operated 2011–2020. Both have served as platforms for Blue Planet II, Mission OceanX (Nat Geo), the rediscovery of the USS Wasp, and countless deep-sea expeditions in the Antarctic, the Galápagos and the Red Sea.
Dalio is the closest active analogue in the world to a Wind Voyage 110 owner. The OceanXplorer mission — private money turned into serious science, plus the storytelling that gives it cultural weight — is the case study we point to when explaining why a wingsail expedition yacht is not a vanity project. A Wind Voyage 110 carries the same ambition but does it on the wind.
If ocean voyaging is something you’d like to pursue, we have developed a way to do it using wind and solar power out of our respect for the oceans.
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