There’s Rare—and then there’s Jay-Z, also Rare.
Sitting courtside during the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden this week, Hove was clutching a piece of his endless assortment of grails. Of course, one could argue that the world’s greatest music mogul wearing one of the world’s rarest watches has become somewhat cliché. Pity! A distinction must be made between, say, a serially produced (albeit highly unusual) Rolex sports model and something like the Sky Moon Tourbillon Ref. 5002.
So what sets the Patek Philippe on Jay’s wrist apart? It was Patek Philippe’s most complicated wristwatch, not to mention its first double-sided wristwatch, when it was launched in 2001. A true “supercomplication”, it had a diameter of 42.8 mm and had at least a dozen functions, including a tourbillon, a retrograde perpetual calendar, a minute repeater, and on the back dial of the watch – an astronomical chart depicting the Northern Hemisphere. (It’s strange to think that today you can get all this information from your iPhone, but 25 years ago it meant spending millions on a mechanical wristwatch.)
Courtesy Patek Philippe; getty images
Sky Moon Tourbillon, manufactured in white gold, yellow gold, pink gold and platinumOne of the maison’s rarest and most expensive intricate pieces. This watch was made in an estimated 80 to 100 specimens, of which about 30 are known to collectors, which is not a huge surprise, as production capacity started at just two specimens per year and increased slightly to 10 over 12 years. No recorded example of the watch is known to have sold for less than $1M, with some examples going for around $1.5M.
But not only this. Patek created special-order editions of the 5002, including a unique version in titanium (!) as well as an execution with a ribbed caseband in place of the Calatrava motif present on serially produced examples. And this is where Jay comes back into the picture: a known collector of wildly rare pieces – including this watch’s successor, Ref. 6002—he looks amazing in the white gold version of the watch with a black dial and red numerals, a unique ref. 5002G-010 which sold for $2.3M at Philips in Hong Kong in November of 2019.
With the Knicks hosting their first Finals game in 27 years, we knew the celebrity front row would have a great collection of watches. courtside tickets Allegedly started At $130,000 per seat, that means anyone sitting there probably has some pretty cool watches. And yet no one’s wrist game really comes close to Jay-Z’s. No matter what’s in your watchbox, there’s a good chance it has something rare.
