The Ultrawealthy Are Diving Deep to Preserve Age-Old Treasures

Advances in deep-sea technology—including autonomous underwater vehicles that map the ocean floor and remotely operated craft that explore wrecks—have ushered in a new era of marine discovery. Sunken treasure ships have been located off the coasts of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. Yet growing resistance to the commercialization of archaeological heritage has made recovery increasingly expensive, contentious, and unlikely to return a profit.

“If you’re hoping to make money by treasure hunting, you’re in for a rough surprise,” says Julian Sancton. “You might as well just be throwing suitcases of cash into the sea.” Sancton’s 2026 book, Neptune’s Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghost of the Spanish Empire, chronicles one such case: the 2015 finding of the San José, an 18th-century Spanish galleon that sank off Colombia carrying billions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver, and jewels. Complex international maritime law, competing ownership claims, ethical infighting among academics about how best to approach the undersea historical site, and the immense technical and fiscal costs of recovery have kept its bounty on the sea floor.

As governments, research institutions, and privateers struggle to afford undersea excursions, a new class of patron has joined the pursuit. Hedge-fund billionaires Ray Dalio and Anthony Clake, along with plastics entrepreneur Carl A. Allen, are financing expeditions for the thrill of the chase, with an eye toward safeguarding history and leaving an enduring imprint on the field. Their method attempts to counter the negative reputation left by treasure hunters of the past. “It’s an industry full of pirates and thieves,” Allen says. “I decided to take a different approach.”

Under Allen’s current contracts with the Bahamian and Philippine governments, his company avoids what he calls the work of “looters and scooters” who sell artifacts and destroy the integrity of the sites.

After the government takes its share—25 percent in the Bahamas and 50 percent in the Philippines—Allen Exploration keeps the remaining finds together. In Freeport, Allen has built the Bahamas Maritime Museum, where relics are cataloged, conserved, and displayed, creating local jobs and drawing tourists. “It’s kind of a middle, third way,” Sancton says, noting that the treasure doesn’t enter the private market for ultrawealthy bidders to hoard in private collections or lie untouched on the seafloor where only academics can study it.

Dalio’s OceanX focuses on exploring uncharted undersea regions and marine life, work supported in part by Triton Submarines, the private-submersible company he co-owns with filmmaker James Cameron. Ocean Infinity, where Clake remains the largest shareholder, searches for wrecks—he backed the San José expedition—but has also become one of the world’s leading ocean-surveying contractors, collaborating with governments, scientific organizations, and energy and telecommunications companies.

See Also

1968 Cadillac Coupe DeVille in Photos

These well-funded ventures may lead to other important discoveries. Sancton says they could locate objects with little commercial value, such as Amelia Earhart’s plane or Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. The same technology could be applied to mining rare-earth minerals from the seafloor—materials used in wind turbines, solar farms, and electric vehicles.

The greatest prize, however, may be the story itself. Deep-sea expeditions offer access to a form of adventure that is both universally compelling and all but unreachable. “We see a docuseries coming out of what we’re doing,” Allen says. “I’ve always believed that the content of what we’re doing may be worth a lot more than what we’re looking for.”