Silicon Valley＇s Newest Status Symbol Is a Super-Rare Sam Altman Swiss Watch－By Andrew Zucke, WSJ

There are many status symbols in Silicon Valley. Homes with views of San Francisco Bay. Cybertrucks. Also on the list are watches, a staple of titans across industries.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg recently wore a $1.3 million watch from F.P. Journe, the luxury Swiss maker. OpenAI founder Sam Altman is also a watch guy, whose wrist has sported styles including a roughly $650,000 piece from another Swiss maker, Greubel Forsey.

Another watch in Altman’s arsenal is more personal—a custom design with OpenAI branding that was created earlier this year by Vanguart, an eight-year-old Swiss watchmaker. Altman ordered seven to be made.

Modeled after Vanguart’s titanium Orb watch, which starts at $180,000, the OpenAI timepieces were for select company personnel. They are of a piece with the clothing being sold by OpenAI and other tech firms , which has given the companies the sheen of being lifestyle brands.

Altman, through an OpenAI spokeswoman, did not comment for this article. News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

Roughly a third of Vanguart’s 33 employees worked on the OpenAI project, said Mehmet Koruturk, chairman and co-founder of the watch company.

The timepieces have a sporty rubber strap, and the ability to switch between automatic and manual winding. Several geeky flourishes were added, including a quote attributed to Altman, “COMPUTE IS DESTINY,” which was engraved in capital letters around each watch’s rotor. Another popular Silicon Valley term, “SCALING,” was engraved in all caps on each’s crown pusher.

The OpenAI logo is featured on the watches, and an inscription on the back of each—“if AGI.aligned: deploy()”—was written in the programming language Python. That detail was suggested by Axel Leuenberger, Vanguart’s CEO and co-founder.

“It means that AI needs to be used for peaceful purposes,” Koruturk said.

Easter-egg details are a signature of Vanguart’s custom designs, Koruturk explained. “We try to do subtle tributes embedded for those who know where to look.”

Part of Vanguart’s proposition to watch enthusiasts is exclusivity. The company’s ready-made pieces are only sold in the U.S. at Material Good, a watch and jewelry store in SoHo. Koruturk said the company has produced fewer than 200 watches. The luxury Swiss maker Audemars Piguet, by comparison, makes around 50,000 watches every year (it has more than 3,000 employees).

Vanguart’s watches are not the only styles with OpenAI branding. In a recent post on X, Boris Power, the company’s head of applied research, said that Tudor, a sister company of Rolex, had manufactured 400 watches with OpenAI’s logo on their dials. On their backs, the watches have the phrase “Good Research Takes Time,” a slogan that has also been used on T-shirts sold by OpenAI . A Tudor representative declined to comment.

Georgia Benjamin, who works in product design at the software company Adobe, is part of a watch-enthusiast group there. She has been working with the British watchmaker Studio Underd0g to make custom styles with Adobe branding—the plan is to make 128 and offer them only to company employees, for around $1,200 each.

Benjamin, who owns about 40 watches, said that working in Silicon Valley can feel like being a part of a large family. “Having something physical to symbolize that makes you feel like you’re in this insider club,” she added, referring to tech-company-branded timepieces.

Watches with designs nodding to other tech giants—including Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon—have also proliferated in recent years, according to Eric Ku, the co-founder of Loupe This, which auctions watches online.

Earlier this year, his company sold a custom Tudor watch with Amazon branding at auction for $8,250. Loupe This is currently auctioning a Tudor Black Bay 54 watch customized with Meta’s logo on its dial. The watch, made this year, has more than a dozen bids on Loupe This, for as high as $10,500. Standard Tudor Black Bay 54 watches with a metal bracelet typically cost $4,725.

“People like collecting things that are unusual and uncommon,” Ku explained. But not all watches with custom branding command top dollar, he added. “People might find them kind of ugly.”