If you’re willing to spend a million dollars on a watch from Jacob & Co., you’ll get VIP treatment.
The seven-figure timepiece was handed to Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo by the company’s founder and creative director.
In a video published to Jacob Arabo’s Instagram over the weekend, the watchmaker can be seen affixing a luxurious Twin Turbo Furious on the Al Nassr forward’s wrist.
While in the area, I brought Cristiano a $1.3 million (£1.05 million) watch in person, as Jacob Arabo wrote on Instagram.
The original Twin Turbo, introduced at Baselworld in 2016, was the first watch to feature both a triple-axis tourbillion and a minute repeater. The 2018 addition of the Twin Turbo Furious, which features a monopusher chronograph and a time difference calculator, takes things even farther.
All of the timepieces in the collection pay homage to high-performance hypercars, and Ronaldo’s is no exception. The model, which was painstakingly hand-decorated and -assembled, is made up of around 832 parts, of which the tourbillons make up 104 parts despite weighing only 1.15 grams.
The massive case and bezel are 57 mm in diameter and are crafted from 18-karat white gold with 344 baguette-cut white diamonds set into them. Both the front and rear of the watch are made of specially curved sapphire crystals so that the JCFM05 movement can be viewed in all its glory. (The power reserve of 50 hours is an astounding feat, given the complexity of the movement.) The dial is made of smokey grey sapphire crystal and has Neoralithe along the outer rim. It also has Super-LumiNova coated luminescent hour and minute hands. A “pit board” and “fuel gauge” add a nod to automobile aesthetics. Only 18 of the timepieces will ever be produced.
With an estimated annual revenue of £110 million, Ronaldo is the highest-paid athlete in the world, and he has spent a significant portion of that fortune on wristwear. A £570,000 Brilliant Flying Tourbillon, a handmade Girard-Perregaux, and, uh, the most expensive Rolex ever produced are just some of the lavish timepieces he has been seen wearing in the past. In July of this year, he made an undisclosed investment in Chrono24, an online marketplace worth an estimated $1 billion.
