There’s rare—and then there’s Jay-Z rare.
Seated courtside during the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden this week, HOV strapped on a piece from his seemingly endless assortment of grails. One could argue, of course, that the world’s greatest music mogul wearing one of the world’s scarcest watches has become somewhat trite. Alas! There is a distinction to be made between, say, a serially produced (albeit highly uncommon) Rolex sports model and something like the Sky Moon Tourbillon ref. 5002.
So what distinguishes the Patek Philippe on Jay’s wrist? This was Patek Philippe’s most complicated wristwatch, not to mention its first double-sided wristwatch, when it launched back in 2001. A genuine “supercomplication,” it measured a gargantuan 42.8mm in diameter and boasted no less than a dozen functions, including a tourbillon, a retrograde perpetual calendar, a minute repeater, and—on the watch’s back dial—a celestial chart depicting the northern hemisphere. (Strange to think that while you can get all this information today from your iPhone, 25 years ago it meant dropping a million bucks on a mechanical wristwatch.)
Courtesy Patek Philippe; Getty Images
The Sky Moon Tourbillon, produced in white gold, yellow gold, rose gold, and platinum, is among the maison’s rarest and most expensive complicated pieces. The watch was made in an estimated 80 to 100 examples, roughly 30 are known to collectors, which isn’t a huge surprise given that production capacity began at just two examples per year before increasing slightly to 10 over a 12-year run. No recorded example of the watch is known to have sold for less than $1M, with some examples even fetching roughly $1.5M.
But that’s not all. Patek made special-order versions 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, the ref. 6002—he appears to be rocking a white gold version of the watch with a black dial and red numerals, a pièce unique ref. 5002G-010 that sold at Phillips in Hong Kong in November of 2019 for $2.3M.
With the Knicks hosting their first Finals game in 27 years, we knew that the celebrity front row would feature a blistering collection of watches. Courtside tickets reportedly started at $130,000 per seat, meaning that anyone sitting down there probably has a few stunning watches kicking around. And yet no one’s wrist game really comes close to Jay-Z’s. No matter what you’ve got in your watchbox, there’s a healthy chance that he’s got something just a bit rarer.
