Mark Zuckerberg Wore A $2 Million Vintage Rolex While Talking Up Biohub’s AI Medical Research Plans

Mark Zuckerberg used a recent appearance on the ‘No Priors’ podcast, alongside his wife Priscilla Chan, to lay out plans for using artificial intelligence to permanently accelerate medical research. The pair discussed Biohub, their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-funded facility that aims to deploy AI models to identify, treat and eventually eradicate human diseases.

What caught watch collectors’ attention was what was on Zuckerberg’s left wrist during the taping: a vintage Rolex Reference 6062, nicknamed ‘Stelline,’ from around 1950. Depending on case metal and condition, examples of the Stelline routinely cross the seven-figure mark at auction, with top variants valued at up to $2 million.

The Reference 6062 was one of only two Rolex models ever built with an automatic triple calendar and integrated moonphase complication, the other being the Reference 8171. It ran on Rolex’s automatic calibre 9¾ movement inside a 36mm Oyster case with a screw-down case back, and the ‘Stelline’ name, meaning ‘little stars’ in Italian, comes from a rare variant that swaps standard hour markers for eight star-shaped gold markers.

Zuckerberg, whose net worth is estimated at $200 billion, has built a watch collection that ranges from a $120 Casio to multimillion-dollar pieces. In 2023, a well-preserved pink gold Stelline sold at Christie’s for 2.2 million Swiss francs, about $2.7 million, while an even rarer black-dial, diamond-marker version sold last year for $6.2 million.

The choice of a purely mechanical, decades-old instrument to accompany a conversation about AI-driven biology was not lost on observers, adding an unusual footnote to a discussion otherwise focused entirely on the future of digital science.