“Lord of the Rings”: Sam Altman Orders 7 Luxury Watches for OpenAI’s Leadership
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has commissioned seven custom watches from the Swiss manufacturer Vanguart. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, and several outlets picked it up in recent days. Altman is reportedly keeping one of the watches for himself, while the other six went to members of the AI company’s leadership team.
A Titanium Case Carrying AI Messages
The pieces are based on the Orb model in titanium, which Vanguart lists at around $180,000. The OpenAI version carries the company logo along with several nods to its work: “COMPUTE IS DESTINY” is engraved around the rotor, and the crown pusher reads “SCALING”. The caseback bears a line written in Python style, “if AGI.aligned: deploy()”, which Vanguart describes as a reference to deploying artificial intelligence for peaceful purposes.
The watches are rare for a simple reason: Vanguart has built fewer than 200 timepieces in its entire history. Roughly a third of the company’s 33 employees are said to have worked on the OpenAI project. Each watch comes on a rubber strap and can be wound automatically or by hand.
Sam Altman @sama just ordered 7 ultra-rare custom Swiss watches from Vanguart, fully branded with the OpenAI logo on the dial. One for him, six for his inner circle.
Inscribed on the back of each watch is ‘if AGI.aligned: deploy()’ which was written in the programming language… pic.twitter.com/BbMBbkXmvZ
— The Luxury Watch Guy (@LuxuryWatchGuy1) August 25, 2026
From a Tudor Run to a Series of Seven
This is not the first watch circulating among OpenAI staff. Some 400 Tudor watches carrying the company logo and the engraving “Good Research Takes Time” were recently handed out to employees. Boris Power, OpenAI’s head of applied research, showed his own on X. Staff at Uber, Palantir and other tech companies have also been posting limited-edition Tudors with their employers’ branding. At seven pieces, the Vanguart commission is in a different league of exclusivity.
On social media, the number seven quickly became the joke. Users compared the commission to the Rings of Power from “The Lord of the Rings” and rewrote Tolkien’s verse for the tech industry. One such post drew more than a million views on X.
Altman’s Own Collection
Altman has been known as a collector for years. He was spotted some time ago wearing a Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1, priced at around $480,000 when it launched and built in a run of just 33. Reports on his other purchases range from sports cars to homes in San Francisco, the Napa Valley and Hawaii.
Zuckerberg, the Best-Known Enthusiast
Altman is far from the only tech chief with a taste for expensive timepieces. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has become a serious collector in the eyes of the watch world. His documented pieces include a Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1, of which only two or three are produced each year and which sells for more than $900,000, a platinum Patek Philippe 5236P with a list price of about $148,000, and models from F.P. Journe and De Bethune. He has also worn a $120 Casio G-Shock. He once described how it started: he had never really wanted a watch, but after seeing one particular piece, he thought watches were cool.
Other Chief Executives Wear Six Figures, Too
The list of tech executives spotted in very expensive watches keeps growing. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang once explained that he deliberately goes without a watch, because the present moment is always the most important one. Photographs have nevertheless shown him recently wearing a Richard Mille RM 27-05, a tourbillon in Carbon TPT that weighs about eleven grams and is valued by watch media at more than $1 million. LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, whose group controls Hublot, Zenith and Tag Heuer, is regularly photographed in pieces from his own houses.
A counter-movement holds its ground alongside all this. Bill Gates has worn a Casio costing double digits for years, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have mostly been seen in Omega models, and plenty of executives simply reach for an Apple Watch. Watch spotting at tech appearances has turned into a discipline of its own, one in which a wrist is read as a statement about identity and milieu.
For Silicon Valley, these pieces have long been more than instruments for telling time. They work as status symbols and as part of a personal brand, and in the case of the OpenAI watches, as a message about how the company sees itself.
