Colin Jost says the decommissioned Staten Island Ferry he bought with Pete Davidson is no longer just an expensive punch line. In a preview of an upcoming May 4 episode of the Smartless podcast, Jost said the pair have “basically made back” their investment through events and that the project is starting to look like something real.
The purchase began in 2022, when Jost and Davidson joined a group of investors to buy the retired ferry for $280,000 after New York City put the John F. Kennedy up for auction. Jost said he first texted his father before telling Scarlett Johansson, and his father’s reply was blunt: “Did you do your homework?” When Jost texted Johansson, his message was, “Guess what? We own a ferry now.” Her first response was one word: “We?”
That reaction fits the scale of the bet. Jost has previously called the purchase “the dumbest and least thought-through purchase I’ve ever made in my life,” and in the new interview he described it as a “sort of crazy money pit” before saying it is no longer quite that. He said the ferry has already brought in enough through “doing some events” that he and Davidson have “basically made back” what they put in.
The ferry still has a long road ahead. Davidson has said the plan is to keep the outside the same and turn the vessel into a destination with a restaurant, concert venue, movie theater and hotels, with the possibility of towing it to Miami in the winter. Jost sketched his own version of the project as “a more middle-class, Manhattan swim club,” while also saying his best outcome would be an event space with an everyday purpose.
For now, the ferry sits somewhere between a joke and a business plan. Jost’s latest comments suggest the pair are closer to proving it can be more than a novelty buy, even if the full version of the project is still, by Davidson’s estimate, about five years away.