A diamond, an Aston and a startup are indicative of market madness
In the last twenty-four hours, three extraordinary priced items have hit the headlines. The first, a diamond, sold at Sotheby’s in Geneva for £51.6 million ($83 million); the second, an unrestored Aston Martin made £131,000 ($209,000) at an auction in Harrogate and the third was the reported £1.9 billion ($3 billion) offer made by Facebook for the app Snapchat.
At Sotheby’s, a New York-based diamond cutter named Isaac Wolf set a new record for a gemstone at auction in paying $83 million for a 59.60 carat pink diamond. Previously named the “Pink Star”, Wolf renamed the oval-cut stone the “Pink Dream” after competing with three others in a five minute bidding war.
The Aston Martin DB6 Vantage sold by Bonhams yesterday achieved £131,420 after a bidding war broke out between online buyers and those in the room at the Yorkshire Showground. A “barn find” that had not been used since the 1990s, the car sold to a Chinese buyer against a pre-sale estimate of just £60,000 to £90,000.
Meanwhile, reports that a 23-year old named Evan Spiegel turned down an offer of $3 billion for his Snapchat app from Facebook are equally extraordinary. These are interesting times in all sectors it seems and these are prices most definitely worthy of chronicling.
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