TL;DR
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s signed leather jacket sold at Sotheby’s for $960,000, far above the $40K-$60K estimate. 45 collectors bid. It retails under $10,000.
One of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s signature black Tom Ford leather jackets sold at Sotheby’s on Friday for $960,000 after 65 bids from 45 collectors. The pre-sale estimate was $40,000 to $60,000. The jacket retails for just under $10,000. Huang wore it in 2023 at a Foxconn event in Taipei and signed it for the auction.
“The response to this sale surpassed even our highest expectations,” said Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of modern collectibles. Proceeds will go to the Edge Institute, a nonprofit supporting innovation through fellowships, grants, and residencies. The AI boom is producing wealth at a scale that turns a CEO’s wardrobe into a collectible asset class. A jacket that costs $10,000 new selling for 96 times that price is less about fashion and more about what Nvidia’s $4.86 trillion market cap has done to the cultural status of its founder.
Huang has worn leather jackets for nearly 20 years, making them his founder’s uniform at product launches, trade shows, and company events. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg traded garments with Huang in a “jersey swap” in 2024, and later received one of Huang’s jackets on stage at a computer graphics conference. “This is worth more because it’s used,” Zuckerberg said. Apple just overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company, but nobody is auctioning Tim Cook’s polo shirts.
