Colin Jost Says Scarlett Johansson Texted “We?” Over $280,000 Ferry
Colin Jost said Scarlett Johansson texted back “We?” after he told her he and Pete Davidson had bought a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry in 2022 for $280,000. The reply turned a private purchase into a very public punch line, but Jost said the project has already started paying for itself through events.
Johansson’s one-word reply
“Guess what? We own a ferry now.” Jost said that was the text he sent Johansson before her “We?” response, a reaction he described while discussing the purchase ahead of an upcoming Smartless episode. He also said he texted his father first, and got back, “Did you do your homework?”
Jost and Davidson bought the former Staten Island Ferry as part of a group of investors after New York City put the John F. Kennedy up for auction. The deal has been discussed as a long-term redevelopment play, but the immediate story is simpler: one spouse treated it like a collective decision, and another treated it like a homework assignment.
Davidson’s five-year timeline
Pete Davidson said the project was still about five years away when he discussed it the following year on Family Trips With the Meyers Brothers podcast. He said, “We just got all the plans built, and we had them do one of those computer-generated, show-you-what-it-could-be type-things, and now we’re out to a few people, and it seems like it’s all going well, but it’s definitely like five years away.”
Davidson also said, “We jokingly named it Titanic 2 on the LLC when we had to buy it,” and described a plan that would keep the ferry’s outside the same while repurposing the interior into a venue with a restaurant, concert venue, movie theater, hotels, and a winter tow to Miami. He later added, “We’re in the hole,” which makes the early event revenue Jost mentioned look less like profit and more like the first sign the boat can actually generate cash.
Jost’s 2024 reset
In 2024, Jost called the purchase “the dumbest and least thought-through purchase I’ve ever made in my life,” then pushed back on the idea that it was just a “sort of crazy money pit.” On Smartless, he said he and Davidson have basically made back their investment already by doing “some events.”
That leaves Jost’s cleaner version of the project: “a more middle-class, Manhattan swim club,” with “a home run” being “a thing that could be used for an event space but also has an everyday purpose.” For now, the ferry story reads less like a novelty buy and more like an expensive asset that has already found one working use before the bigger redevelopment arrives.
