Mark Zuckerberg’s $2 Million Vintage Rolex Stole The Show During His AI Medical Research Interview

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for the ‘No Priors’ podcast with his wife Priscilla Chan to talk about Biohub, the couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-funded effort to use artificial intelligence to identify, treat and eventually eradicate human diseases. It was meant to be a conversation about the future of science, but the internet quickly zeroed in on something else: the watch on his wrist.

Horological experts identified it as a vintage Rolex Reference 6062, nicknamed ‘Stelline,’ a mid-century piece produced only briefly around 1950. It was one of just two Rolex models ever built with both an automatic triple calendar and an integrated moonphase complication, alongside the Reference 8171, and top examples now sell for up to $2 million at auction.

The ‘Stelline’ nickname, Italian for ‘little stars,’ comes from a rare version of the watch where eight star-shaped gold markers replace the standard hour markers. In 2023, a well-preserved pink gold example sold at Christie’s for 2.2 million Swiss francs, about $2.7 million, and an even rarer black-dial, diamond-marker version went for $6.2 million at auction last year.

Zuckerberg, whose net worth is estimated at $200 billion, has amassed a collection that spans a $120 Casio to multimillion-dollar vintage pieces. Past sightings include a Patek Philippe Reference 5236P posted to Instagram in September 2024, a De Bethune DB25 Starry Varius worth over $80,000, and a Greubel Forsey piece worth more than $900,000.

Pairing a purely mechanical, 75-year-old timepiece with a conversation about AI and the future of medicine turned out to be exactly the kind of contrast that gets a tech CEO trending for reasons that have nothing to do with tech.