Sam Altman's love of watches is getting memed 'Lord of the Rings' style

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.

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.

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.