Why the ultra-rich are investing in weird collectables

Telegraph

02-07-2025

The theatre of a much-anticipated auction has traditionally played out around unearthed Turners, Renoirs or Caravaggios. Now, the drama is more likely to focus on the whirr of a 50-year-old computer slowly booting up than it is on an Old Master being revealed.
An Apple I – the first product manufactured by the two maverick Steves (Wozniak and Jobs) – is one of the most talked-about items on the ticket for Sotheby's this year. Once the playthings of messy-haired visionaries in Californian garages, these clunky early computers – which have all the visual appeal of a bread bin when compared with the supermodel-like MacBooks of today – are now spoken about in reverent tones, as if they were ancient relics. Yet tracking down a usable model is a task even a young Harrison Ford might baulk at.
The first 50 Apple computers ever made were sold by Jobs and Wozniak in a single consignment in 1976, to the Byte Shop in California, where they retailed at a tongue-in-cheek $666.66 each; in total, just 200 of the model were ever made. Most were bought by an entirely new type of enthusiast: the tech geek.
Being geeks, they weren't content simply to own one of the first affordable home computers – they wanted to tinker until they understood exactly how it worked. By doing so, they usually ran them into the ground and as a result very few still switch on.
Now, Cassandra Hatton – the Indiana Jones of weird collectables and a vice-chairman at Sotheby's New York – has in her hands the holy grail: an Apple I from that first consignment that has sat, untouched and forgotten, on a dusty backroom shelf for nearly five decades. She believes it is the most valuable model ever to have come to market – and says it was only powered up for the first or second time in her office, making it a still-functioning portal to the dawn of the industry that changed the world.
'The underside of the board of these models was coated in a green paint,' she says. 'In the 1970s, computers still ran incredibly hot, and each time the machine was powered on, the paint on the board bubbled and came off.' Most of the machines she is offered have no paint left; this one is still a pristine green.
It is going on sale during Sotheby's 'Geek Week' – a programme of auctions dedicated to such objects, launched by Hatton in response to increasing demand – which will run for the first two weeks of July in New York.
Sotheby's has also recently established a dedicated pop culture category, which will have sales twice a year offering items from film, music, television and comics. The Apple I's estimate is $400,000 to $600,000 – about £300,000 to £450,000 – though it could sell for 10 times that.
Once the preserve of Picassos, pearls and people speaking knowledgeably about provenance over an expensive lunch, the auction world has changed. The arrival of tech barons and crypto-kings has – among other factors – forced major auction houses to shift their focus, while online auctions have become increasingly lucrative. Objects that, to the untrained eye, look like clutter brought down from the attic, have become prized possessions: rusting computers, moon rocks, figurines, Pokémon cards and geeky film props.
The numbers are staggering: in November, the Marauder's Map from the Harry Potter film series sold for £239,400; earlier this year, a Star Wars prop (Chewbacca's crossbow) sold for $768,600 (£564,740); while this month a human-sized Labubu doll (toys that have recently erupted in popularity online) was bought in Beijing for £110,465.
It is particularly hard to imagine how the old guard of the art world reacted when a Cheeto (the American equivalent of a Wotsit) in the shape of a Pokémon sold for $87,840 (£68,000) through Goldin Auctions in March.
'A class of people who owe their success to time spent in labs or with computers back when it wasn't the coolest thing now has more disposable income than almost anyone else,' says Hatton.
'They look back on the interests they had when they were young and realise that – while it didn't necessarily make them popular at the time – it has made them powerful in the long run. I always like to validate my clients' taste: I like to tell them they were right all along.'
In this new era of collecting, James Hyslop – Christie's head of science and natural history, who launched the first dedicated live meteorite sale at the auction house in London a decade ago – feels a responsibility to ensure that such august houses retain a sense of gravitas, no matter what they are selling.
'We are incredibly selective: for every 100 meteorites we get offered – I get sent five to 10 a week – we only take one,' he says. 'We are determined to present only the very best. For us to take on a meteorite, it has to be spectacularly beautiful, spectacularly rare, or spectacularly important. Ideally, all three.'
Still, appraising a meteorite, computer or dinosaur bone remains a complicated business. Unlike with a van Gogh or a tiara, there is no well-trodden path to follow, and Hyslop has had to create a value system based on the size, shape, science and story of each meteorite.
'Size is pretty easy; the bigger the meteorite, the more valuable,' he says. The story often comes down to whether it was in a notable collection in the 18th or 19th centuries, which was a time when people began to understand that meteorites weren't just omens sent down by angry gods.
'Shape is interesting,' he adds. 'The cosmic forces that created them have made some spectacular shapes, like Henry Moore sculptures.' Hyslop recalls a sale when a Giacometti sculpture was coming out of the studio just as one of his meteorites was going in – the two looked so eerily similar that the photographer was momentarily confused.
And then there is the science, which is arguably most interesting in meteorites that originated on Mars or the moon. 'Aside from the small amount the Apollo missions brought back, this is the only way to analyse the surface of the moon. If you own it, you can see under a microscope how it formed – a snapshot of how the early solar system condensed,' explains Hyslop.
Some of the most valuable meteorites have fetched hundreds of thousands of pounds, with one fetching more than £1 million.
Today's ultra-rich – wary of being predictable, perhaps, and keen to stick to the industries they have always understood – are also seemingly less interested in cosplaying as members of the traditional cultural elite.
Instead they want artefacts that help them understand the world, on their own terms – and as a result, status symbols are starting to change, with a piece of rock from Mars or Buzz Aldrin's jacket becoming the new Jeff Koons balloon animal.
'Collectors are increasingly drawn to objects that reflect personal passions and cultural resonance,' agrees Hatton. 'A space suit or a fossil can be just as compelling as a painting, not just for its rarity, but for the story it tells and the sense of nostalgia it evokes.'
As a consequence, certain professions have become surprisingly lucrative. Until very recently, dusting for dinosaur bones was mostly the preserve of dutiful palaeontologists toiling in the sun in the hope of making a scientific breakthrough.
Now, these bones have become must-have items for hedge-fund managers and tech bros who already own four Teslas and a private jet, and want something more exciting.
The catch? Dinosaur remains are only regularly found in a few countries, and nearly all have barred their export and sale. The United States is an exception. Under US law, whoever owns the land, owns the bones.
'There are so many places – notably Mongolia and parts of Africa – that have amazing dinosaurs, but the US is the only place that allows private sales,' says Hatton. 'So we have a very narrow supply but a very broad interest.'
One of Hatton's greatest coups came last summer, when she brought Apex the Stegosaurus to auction. 'We worked directly with the person who excavated it. It was the biggest and most complete Stegosaurus ever found, on someone's farm in Colorado. It sold for $45 million – a record for any dinosaur.'
Billionaire Kenneth C Griffin, founder and chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, bought the Stegosaurus, which is now on loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Still, the market for new collectables remains volatile and Hatton had put a lower estimate of just $4 million on Apex. 'If I'm selling a Picasso or a first-edition, I can base an estimate on past sales. That's not a luxury we have in these markets,' she says.
Even trickier was bringing an NFT (non-fungible token) of Tim Berners-Lee's original source code for the World Wide Web to auction. It sold for $5.4 million (£3.9 million) in 2021, with Berners-Lee transferring the code directly to the buyer's computer.
'How do you describe something like that?' Hatton asks. 'It's wildly different from a painting or a book – but it has an impact that will stand the test of time. We'll be talking about the invention of the web for centuries.'
That being said, we have never been particularly good at predicting which artefacts will fascinate future generations. In the Victorian era, for example, there was a deft and acceptable trade in post-mortem photography (portraits of the dead, often posed as if still alive) and human bones.
In today's collecting world, Hatton explains, people are increasingly drawn to objects that tell a story, be it related to a scientific milestone, digital breakthrough or rare fossil. 'Recently I have noticed a clear shift toward cross-category collecting,' she says, 'with buyers looking to build intellectually and emotionally compelling collections across many different categories.'
At least one of those categories is likely to include the Japanese media franchise Pokémon, whose cartoon characters have risen from pride of place on the children's lunchboxes of the 1990s to become a full-blown economic phenomenon.
At London's Comic Con in May, as adult humans dressed as Snorlax and the Hulk wandered past, eBay hosted a live Pokémon-card auction with all the pomp of Sotheby's – albeit if a Sotheby's sale was being run by two Pokémon influencers shouting, 'Let's gooo!' into a ring light. Standing in the crowd, under a screen showing how many thousands of people were watching from around the world, I felt briefly like I was in a Black Mirror episode about the reshaping of culture.
For Roy Raftery, 38, who sold his London Pokémon shop to join Stanley Gibbons Baldwin's auction house as an in-house expert two years ago, this kind of thing would be just another day at the office. He explains why there is so much money to be made in selling what, to the untrained eye, just looks like a small cartoon card.
'The biggest boom happened during the pandemic. Everyone was stuck at home digging out old cards and rediscovering childhood hobbies,' he says. 'Then some really good modern sets came out, and suddenly there was a whole new generation of collectors opening packs online for huge audiences.'
And buying them at auction. Again, the sums involved can be mind-boggling. In 2022, a Charizard first-edition shadowless card went for £300,000. And in 2021, in a private sale, YouTuber Logan Paul purchased a 1998 Pikachu Illustrator card for £3.8 million.
For traditional auction houses, this was the Wild West. Raftery recalls the time, about five years ago, when Sotheby's asked him to analyse some Pokémon cards they believed were valuable first editions. He had to explain they were worth about £10.
While spending thousands on a box of cartoon cards may sound odd to most of us, this trend – like so many – is built on nostalgia. 'A collector who's 25 wants something very different to a collector who's 35 – because if you were 10 in 1999 you want the original card, but not if you were 10 in 2009,' says Raftery. 'And as for people over 38; they are rarely in it for love, it's generally just London bankers with lots of disposable income who think they have resale value.'
Still, that Antiques Roadshow thrill exists. Raftery tells me about a man who, to bond with his daughter in the 1990s, collected Pokémon cards. Years later, he found the boxes in the attic and – having forgotten they were even there – sold them for nearly £65,000, allowing his daughter to buy her first home.
'People like to dismiss Pokémon, but it is a multibillion-dollar industry,' Raftery continues. 'Pikachu is now more recognised than George Washington or Ronald McDonald.'
And yet for Matthew Haley – the managing director of Bonhams Knightsbridge – there is something delightfully old-fashioned about all this. 'It is a very interesting phenomenon in that it is a continuum of what has always been there: people used to collect cigarette or baseball cards, now it is Pokémon.
'The oddest things go on sale these days – someone auctioned some gum chewed by Britney Spears [it sold for about £10,000] – but really it is just a modern version of the classic cabinet of curiosities, and it is worth noting that in this very digital age, nearly everything we are talking about is a physical object.'
If millennials are nostalgic about Pokémon, then baby boomers feel similarly about the first moon landings. 'For people who grew up in the 1960s, it is a core memory,' says Hatton. 'Perhaps because the moon landing was the one time when everyone in the world paid attention at the same time for a good reason.'
Original astronauts and their families have been selling their collections for a few decades now. And boy, are they impressive. In the 1960s and Seventies, Nasa was too busy trying to get people to space and back to spend much time thinking about its archives, so it often allowed the astronauts to take flight plans and items of kit home.
Haley tells me about going to Florida to meet Edgar Mitchell from Apollo 14. 'He was the archetypal sweet older American man – very kind and warm – and yet in the hallway of his house there are photos of him standing on the moon and in his attic the most amazing treasure trove of things.'
Haley adds, 'The collectors interested in this are the biggest buyers in the world; that group that is at the intersection between tech and space exploration, like Jeff Bezos.'
Hatton, meanwhile, was one of the first people to see the flown Apollo 13 flight plan since the 1970s. And in the process, she managed to correct a false piece of space history. In the Tom Hanks film, the flight-plan cover is torn off to create a makeshift CO2 filter; this was something space historians at the time widely agreed was true.
'I was the one who discovered it was wrong. I sold that flight plan, and the cover was still intact. It was incredible, I had historians saying I didn't know what I was doing; that everyone knows the cover of the flight plan was ripped off. I was able to come back and say, 'You're all wrong.''
Perhaps that is the appeal of these strange relics. They are more than just objects; they are portals into the past, offering us the chance to investigate the worlds that fascinated us as children.
In an era that moves at break-neck speed, these items – whether a cartoon card, a meteorite from the moon, a dinosaur bone or an astronaut's jacket – anchor us to this other pre-internet age; one when the world was different. And when, crucially, we were young.