The average American consumer wastes about $5,400 on impulse purchases. These purchases could be junk food or appliances or clothes they don’t need or want.
But imagine if you could spend millions on weird art, a domain name, or a mountain-sized clock.
Would you spend millions on weird items because you could or the bragging rights?
Here is a list of four weird items that rich people spent millions to possess.
Dead shark art exhibit, $8 million to $12 million
In 1990, noted art collector and business mogul Charles Saatchi commissioned English artist Damien Hirst to create anything he wanted. Saatchi paid Hirst about $95,000.
Hirst then hired an Australian fisherman to catch a 14-foot tiger shark in 1991. Hirst then mounted the aesthetically terrifying shark in a large tank and filled it with over $100,000 worth of formaldehyde.
When the first shark decomposed too quickly before being immersed in the formaldehyde, Saatchi commissioned Hirst to get another tiger shark.
Hirst named the dead shark art exhibit, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” The exhibit is considered an example of 1990s “Britart.”
It reportedly sold for anywhere between $8 million to $12 million to a private collector. Some reports allege that it was sold to hedge fund financier Steven Cohen.
Insure.com domain name, $16 million
Everyone knows the value of having a good domain name. But this was not always the case. In the late 1990s, which was the dawn of the internet, a Canadian man named Jeff Burgar saw the future.
Burgar began buying and registering over 1,300 internet domain names named after famous celebrities. Bruce Springsteen lost a 2001 legal battle to claim “Brucespringteen.com,” because Burgar claimed it first. The Boss can only use “Brucespringsteen.net.”
The point is that owning the right domain name can do wonder for your business in an online e-commerce world.
The American insurance industry alone is worth $1.4 trillion. So to capitalize on this fact, a marketing company called QuinStreet bought the domain name “Insure.com,” for $16 million in 2009.
Jeff Bezos’s $42 million forever clock
As much as Jeff Bezos has changed human society by revolutionizing e-commerce, the guy sure does not make it easy to overlook the James Bond villain comparison jokes he suffers through from critics.
In 2018, Bezos commissioned the construction of a 500-foot clock to be constructed inside of an excavated mountain. The clock will tick once annually and chime once every thousand years. The clock will be powered by the thermal cycles of the planet.
Bezos said the clock is a reminder to everyday people that the future connects us to our future descendants, whatever that means.
Bezos’s mountain-sized clock is still being constructed and is projected to cost over $42 million after completion.
NFT art, $69 million
One of the reasons why NFTs have taken off in popularity is due to the artists Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple.
An NFT can basically be described as a digital file and certificate authenticating that specific image so that can’t be duplicated or forged.
In March 2021, Beeple sold an NFT art file called “The First 5,000 Days,” for over $69 million at a Christie’s auction. The NFT is a digital collage of every digital art file Beepple created from 2007 through 2021.
Beeple sold the NFT art piece to cryptocurrency investor and entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, who also goes by the name MetaKovan.
