One does not simply commission seven ultra-rare OpenAI watches without attracting a few “Lord of the Rings” jokes.
When The Wall Street Journal reported this week on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s love of watches, one detail stood out — that earlier this year, he commissioned seven custom timepieces from ultra-luxe Swiss manufacturer Vanguart.
The Journal reported that one watch was for Altman, while the other six were for senior OpenAI staff. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
This soon caught the attention of watch enthusiasts on X, with one account, The Luxury Watch Guy, gaining over a million views on a post about the watches. This, in turn, spawned memes, and lots of them, many riffing on Silicon Valley’s long-standing love of “The Lord of the Rings.”
The idea of rare, custom-built pieces of jewelry going to a select group drew an obvious parallel from X users — the “Rings of Power” in J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy epic.
Rory Johnston, an energy market researcher, responded with a still from the opening of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Another user rewrote Tolkien’s verse for the tech industry, assigning watches to AI researchers, venture capitalists, and “SaaS founders doomed to die.”
The post placed one watch with Altman “on his dark throne in the land of Silicon Valley where the shadows lie.”
three watches for the AI researchers under the sky,
seven for the venture capitalists in their halls of stone,
nine for the saas founders doomed to die,
one for Sam Altman on his dark throne
in the land of silicon valley where the shadows lie.one watch to rule them all, one…
— David Elikwu FRSA ⚔️ (@Delikwu) August 25, 2026
According to the Wall Street Journal’s report, the custom watches were modeled on Vanguart’s titanium Orb, which starts at $180,000.
The Vanguarts are not Altman’s first rare timepieces. In 2023, he was spotted wearing a Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1, which was priced at about $480,000 at the time of release. Only 33 were made.
More broadly, watches have become increasingly visible status symbols and personal-branding tools among Silicon Valley’s elite.
Last week, employees at OpenAI, Uber, Palantir, and other tech companies took to X to show off limited-edition Tudor watches customized with their employers’ branding.
Boris Power, OpenAI’s head of applied research, recently shared pictures of a company-branded Tudor engraved with “Good Research Takes Time.”
Power said 400 of those watches were made — a limited run, but a considerably larger one than Altman’s seven-piece Vanguart commission.
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