Rolex's Four Seasons Daytona collection sells for $49.4 million at charity sale

Four one-of-a-kind Rolex Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytonas sold in London for a combined $49.4 million, or £37.3 million, at what Phillips billed as Rolex's first charity auction. Aurel Bacs conducted the sale. Proceeds go to the Federer Foundation, founded by Roger Federer, and to Re:wild, co-founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, both tied to Rolex's Perpetual Planet Initiative.

Each watch represented a season and each was cased in precious metal with a natural stone dial and gem-setting. The Winter Daytona, in platinum with a blue opal dial and lapis lazuli counters, made $13.2 million, or £10 million. The Autumn Daytona, in yellow gold with a mookaite dial and chrysoprase counters, made $13.5 million, or £10.2 million.

The Spring Daytona, in white gold with a chrysoprase dial and lepidolite counters, sold for $9 million, or £6.8 million, the lowest of the four. The Summer Daytona, in Everose gold with a turquoise dial and ruby counters, topped the group at $13.65 million, or £10.3 million, the single highest price of the night.

How this compares with the market's benchmark sales

Paul Newman's own Daytona reset the market for the model, and for watches generally, when it sold at Phillips in New York for $17.75 million nearly nine years ago.

A second benchmark came in December 2021, when a Tiffany-blue Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 made $6.5 million and reshaped how collectors priced dial rarity and retailer tie-ins. Between Newman's watch, the Tiffany Nautilus and tonight's Four Seasons set, the trade now has three sales it treats as turning points across a decade.

The timing sharpens the effect. Phillips set the record for the highest-grossing watch auction ever in Geneva this past May, taking CHF 74.8 million, and the next round of Geneva sales opens in under six weeks.

Phillips and Antiquorum sell on November 7 and 8, Sotheby's follows on the 8th and Christie's on the 9th, with Hong Kong and New York sales still to come this year.

Why Rolex staged the sale now

The auction caps a year in which Rolex has repeatedly stepped outside its usual release calendar. It began with the 100th anniversary of the Oyster case, marked at Watches and Wonders with the Oyster Perpetual 100th Anniversary Edition in Rolesor, and continued two weeks ago with an off-season unveiling of the Perpetual Padellone in Milan, something Rolex rarely does.

Rolex has also been putting money behind its environmental program. It gave $100 million to National Geographic's Museum of Exploration, which reopened in June in Washington, D.C., and last week premiered season six of Planet Visionaries, its podcast hosted by Alex Honnold, during Climate Week in New York.

The Federer Foundation and Re:wild both connect to Rolex Testimonees, the brand's term for the athletes and public figures it sponsors, and the sale links three strands of the year at once: high-end watchmaking, the Perpetual Planet Initiative, and the Testimonee roster the brand built those campaigns around.

The model itself has had a quieter but still significant year. At Watches and Wonders, Rolex announced the new Daytona reference 126502, a Rolesium model with a white grand feu enamel dial that many at the fair called their favorite release. Set against the bigger unveilings, the Daytona had gone largely unremarked until tonight.

We have called Rolex the gold standard of the industry, and rank it above Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet in our ranking of the best luxury watch brands, citing build quality, value retention and instant recognition as the measures that separate it from the field.

That reputation is built largely on steel sports models rather than jeweled precious-metal one-offs. Our coverage of watches jewelry has tracked the gap between Rolex's list prices and what buyers actually pay: the Submariner retails around $10,050 while the Tudor Black Bay, built by Rolex's own sister brand, sells for about $5,000, and the Explorer's $7,900 retail is well above the Tudor Ranger's roughly $4,025.

Those figures describe Rolex's production models, not the Four Seasons Daytonas, which were built as singular pieces rather than catalog watches and priced accordingly.

No date has been given for a repeat of the format, and Phillips has not said whether Rolex plans another charity sale.