World most expensive watch sold for £24.2m

A Patek Philippe watch has sold for a record 31m Swiss francs (£24.2m) at a charity auction hosted by Christie’s in Switzerland. It is by far the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch, and all of the proceeds will be donated to research into muscular dystrophy.


The Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime 6300A-010, which was created specially for the charity auction Only Watch, was bought by a private telephone bidder following a five-minute auction at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues, in Geneva, on Saturday. It had been expected to sell for SFr2.5-3m.

The watch beat the previous record, set by a Daytona Rolex once owned by Paul Newman, which sold for $17.8m in 2017.

Sabine Kegel, the head of Christie’s watch department in Geneva, said the watch was “the most complicated wristwatch ever made … it does nearly everything except making coffee”. She said the watch had attracted “a lot of interest from new clients because it was a charity auction”.