Silicon Valley has run through a lot of flexes. The hoodie. The Tesla. The Cybertruck parked outside a Palo Alto bungalow worth eight figures. The latest one is smaller, quieter and sits on the wrist. It is also the most expensive thing most of these men own that is not real estate. And Sam Altman has taken it further than anyone else in tech.The OpenAI chief executive commissioned seven custom watches from Vanguart, a Swiss maker that has been around for barely eight years, according to a Wall Street Journal report. They were built for a handful of hand-picked OpenAI staff, and the engraving reads less like watchmaking and more like an in-joke from a research lab. The order was based on Vanguart’s titanium Orb, a model that starts at $180,000—which puts seven of them past the million-dollar mark before customisation. Altman declined to comment through an OpenAI spokeswoman.
What’s actually engraved on Sam Altman’s OpenAI watch
Wind the watch and you’ll find “COMPUTE IS DESTINY” running around the rotor in capitals, a line attributed to Altman himself. The crown pusher carries a single word—”SCALING”. Flip it over and the caseback reads if AGI.aligned: deploy(), written in Python, rendered in colour on the movement, the way code looks inside an editor with syntax highlighting on. It also has “LIMITED OpenAI” stamped around the rim. And, there’s an OpenAI logo on the dial.
Vanguart engraved ‘SCALING’ on the crown pusher and ‘COMPUTE IS DESTINY’ around the rotor of the OpenAI watches
That last one was suggested by Axel Leuenberger, Vanguart’s CEO and co-founder. Company chairman and co-founder Mehmet Koruturk told the Journal the line is about AI being put to peaceful use. OpenAI’s knot logo sits at 12 o’clock as an applied, openworked piece, roughly where a brand name would normally go. Hands and hour markers glow a pale green, and the flying tourbillon spins away in the open at 6 o’clock with no dial covering it.Underneath the styling is a serious watch. The Orb runs 41mm across and 10.5mm thick in grade 5 titanium, with a movement of 395 components, 35 jewels and about 60 hours of power reserve. Switching between automatic and manual winding is done through the crown, and in automatic mode a titanium orbital mass set with a 2mm diamond circles a track on the dial side, appearing to float.
Vanguart is tiny even by Swiss watchmaking standards
Roughly a third of Vanguart’s 33 employees worked on the OpenAI commission, Koruturk said. For scale: Audemars Piguet has more than 3,000 staff and turns out about 50,000 watches a year. Vanguart has made fewer than 200 in its entire existence. In the US, its ready-made pieces are sold at exactly one address—Material Good in SoHo.Hidden details are a house habit. Koruturk told the Journal the brand aims for “subtle tributes embedded for those who know where to look.”
OpenAI’s Tudor watch is the version mortals can chase
Not every OpenAI watch costs as much as an apartment. Boris Power, the company’s head of applied research, posted on X that Tudor—Rolex’s sister brand—made 400 watches carrying the OpenAI logo on the dial, with “Good Research Takes Time” on the back, a slogan OpenAI has also printed on T-shirts.And OpenAI is far from alone. Business Insider reported that Palantir staff got a run of 468, an Uber engineer posted a model numbered 1/100, and Google’s version used the Tudor Pelagos, which retails around $4,500. These aren’t gifts from HR. They’re organised by employee collector groups, who round up enough buyers to hit Tudor’s minimum order of 40, then wait about six months. Everyone pays full retail.At Adobe, product designer Georgia Benjamin is working with British watchmaker Studio Underd0g on a 128-piece run at around $1,200 each, for employees only. Benjamin, who owns about 40 watches, described the appeal as belonging to an insider club.
Why company-logo watches now resell above retail
The secondary market has noticed. Eric Ku, co-founder of online auction house Loupe This, sold an Amazon-branded Tudor earlier this year for $8,250. A Tudor Black Bay 54 customised with Meta’s logo has drawn bids as high as $10,500—a standard version with a metal bracelet retails for $4,725. Business Insider reported that a Google Tudor featuring the Chrome dinosaur went past $10,000 at auction, while an Apple “pirate” edition pulled a $13,500 bid. Ku’s read is simple: collectors chase the unusual. He also warned that plenty of branded pieces flop—people sometimes just find them ugly.None of this is new territory for tech’s biggest names. Mark Zuckerberg has worn a $1.3 million F.P. Journe. Altman’s collection includes a Greubel Forsey that ran to roughly $650,000. What’s changed is the flex itself—less about what the watch cost, more about the logo on the dial telling you where its owner works.
