When Jacob & Co. unveiled its newest Billionaire Watch—the new $20 million Billionaire Timeless Treasure—in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday night, it astounded watch collectors, the media, and other interested parties. The sculpture soon gained attention once it was unveiled at the yearly Watches & Wonders exhibition. That’s not just because buying one will require pockets deeper than the mantle of the Earth, but also because finding rare yellow diamonds, cutting them, and placing them in a complex gold bracelet takes time and effort. Oh, and creating a tourbillon watch with a skeletonized face that can actually tell its owner the time.
The watch has taken three and a half years to complete, with a large portion of that time spent merely trying to locate enough yellow diamonds of the same hue and quality to adorn the bracelet, bezel, dial, and crown of the clock. According to Jacob & Co., which put together a special team of 10 people to find, select, and cut the gems, it nearly depleted the available supply of these extremely rare stones.
Seraina Wicht, the company’s head of gemology watch manufacture, stated in a statement, “With white diamonds, we receive lots with dozens or hundreds of jewels. “We were getting stones for Billionaire Timeless Treasure one by one, two by two, and at most three. We occasionally went for several weeks without getting a single one that was deserving of the article.
Jacob & Co.’s gem cutters in Geneva produced 425 fancy yellow and fancy intense yellow Asscher-cut diamonds totaling little under 217 carats after finding all the required rocks (a total of roughly 880 carats of stones in the rough). When combined with the 76 vivid green, emerald-cut and kite-cut tsavorites that encircle the watch’s movement, the company’s gem-setters created a gold lattice that allowed all of the stones to be invisibly set—at first glance, they don’t appear to be held together by anything other than what they have in common. (The unique Caviar Flying Tourbillon “Tsavorites” that Cristiano Ronaldo recently purchased from Jacob & Co. are covered in the same rare variety of garnet.)
The coolest aspect of the watch, though, may be the least noticeable: If you turn it over to look at the movement through the sapphire caseback, you’ll see that the word “billionaire” has a smiley face engraved in the letter “o,” demonstrating that, despite being a fairly serious watch, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
If you’re not a fan of diamonds, you might believe that the watch won’t appeal to you. But some of the most well-known men in the world have previously purchased—and are currently sporting—previous models of the Billionaire watch, which has been made in relatively small numbers since 2014. Floyd Mayweather, a boxing legend, and DJ Khaled both own a white diamond engagement ring set. Mayweather revealed on Instagram that he spent roughly $18 million on his.
All of this is to indicate that you might lose if you bet that this bizarre piece of jewelry and horological skill won’t find a home any time soon.
