At a certain point — say, around the million dollar-mark — a watch transcends “exorbitantly expensive” and moves into its own category of horological insanity. There’s no common name for this category of watches, but the general theme is, “Who in the hell would pay that much for a watch?” Someone who buys race horses like they’re a pack of gum at the checkout counter; someone whose yachts tow little yachts behind them, for entering lagoons that are too small for the primary yachts. In short: someone to whom money doesn’t mean that much, or anything at all.
Which means there’s an argument to be made that the following watches are not worth all that much — at least to their owners. Most likely, they are another item in a vast collection, locked away in some vault deep underground, never to be worn.
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But that’s not fun to think about. What’s fun to think about is if they were somehow yours. You would wear them, wouldn’t you? You’d give them their place in the sun, and when someone asked you if that was the world-famous watch that had been stolen from an underground vault in Geneva, you’d shrug and say, “What, this old thing? I picked it up off eBay for a $300 bucks. Pretty cool though, huh?”
While there are brands that slap a price tag on a watch like the ostensibly $55M Graff Hallucination, it’s not confirmed that anyone ever paid that for it. Others, still, might be “value at” $30M like the genuinely fascinating Breguet Marie-Antoinette Grand Complication watch, but again, that doesn’t mean they’ve been sold for that amount. Below are those that have actually realized the most eye-watering prices.
Patek Philippe ref. 1518 in Steel: $11M
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