Evidence That Some People Have More $$$ Than Brain Cells
Most expensive car ever auctioned is sold for $34.65 million
Yeah, I get that it’s a “Ferrari”. Still – nearly $35 million for a freaking car? That’s . . . just plain stupid.
I wonder if the new owner wants to buy a bridge? (smile)
Category: "Teh Stoopid", WTF?
My integrity is available for sale. You decide what bidding starts at and bid in the replies.
sincerely
John “Faker 6” Giduck
Didn’t know you had any left.
If the highest bid is a negative number, that means you pay the winner – right? (smile)
Definitely not worth buying. Lol.
Fill in the blanks:
A (______) and his (______) are soon (_____).
A (fool) and his (money) are soon (partying).
What did I win?
sincerely
John “Faker 6” Giduck
A hearty handshake and a bowl of soup.
Cream of Sum Yung Gai? My favorite especially when warm!
sincerely
John “Faker 6” Giduck
Man…what I could do with 34.65 million! Man…what I could do with .65 million!
Good grief! For $100,000.00 I’ll sell him a chocolate colored 3/4 lab!
Well, lucky for you there is a bridge available!
(And this is not a joke.)
http://raisedonhoecakes.com/ROH/2014/08/16/if-you-believe-that-we-have-a-bridge-to-sell-you/
The Sellwood Bridge outside of Portland is being sold by the county government.
For that kind of money…hell, for 1/10–no, 1/100 of that kind of money, that car’d better get 500 miles to the gallon, max out at Mach 2.8, have a bitchin’ sound system that shatters glass and drops birds out of the sky, a king-size fold-out bed in the trunk, a push-button coffee maker/alcoholic drink mixer, leather seats made of blue whale hide, and your choice of stunning female passenger offering unlimited blowjobs.
Otherwise, not worth the money.
The reality would be you’d have to adopt a mechanic and become very fluent in Italian curse words.
For that amount of money, the engine needs to run on water. The government has that engine in secret storage at Area 51 along with the Ark of the Covenant and Elvis in a cryogenic tube.
My argument against the tinfoil-hat crowd, especially against James “Fat, disgusting, doucherocket lump of snakeshit” Janos, is that Area 51 is Groom Lake. While I certainly have no difficulty attributing stupidity to the Federal Government, YOU CAN SEE GROOM LAKE FROM THE ROAD!!! Do you really think that, with all the millions of acres of Nellis AFB that’s fenced off and inaccessible and can’t be seen without a satellite, they would really put any of the really secret shit there?
Sorry, just felt like getting that off my chest. Besides, everybody knows that having the Ark, Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa, and the magnetic aliens that close to a public road is asking for trouble. That nondescript warehouse has to be a wee bit farther inside the fence!
The Other Whitey…I agree. God forbid they should let Elvis loose and the fat bastard started singing again. Never was an Elvis fan myself.
CLAW131…I hope they have those things in Area 51, 😀 but I say save some tax dollars and thaw Elvis out and lose him in the desert somewhere.
It may be a rare, and a Ferrari, but in my neck of the woods today is the 20th annual Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise (http://www.woodwarddreamcruise.com/) which is more my speed.
Feast your eyes on somewhere around 40,000(!)cars from the past – from 100% stock to major custom work to classic hot rods to the track ready dragster I saw today. This event draws around 1 million people every year. Locals nearby either love it or hate it because of the traffic.
Back in the day, Woodward Avenue from Ferndale to Pontiac Michigan was the place to hang out, cruise and yes, race, until the emissions controls and the gas shortage killed the horsepower race in the early 1970’s.
Oh, and there are plenty of cars for sale for a lot less than almost 35 mil!
It is definitely alot of cash…..you can’t take it with you though.
At the same time, this piece of automotive history will be well preserved. It was a famous race car after all and the amount of precision engineering that went into it was decades ahead of its time.
Is it worth the amount? Only the buyer can answer that.
No offense, Hondo, but the Brooklyn Bridge analogy doesn’t work for me for a couple of reasons:
While it may be true there is something of a bubble going on in the car collector realm, it’s also true that not only is the car just sold a Ferrari, it also happens to be one of the best Ferrari models ever made, and of a kind rarely on the market at all. It’s a work of art without any stretch of the term.
It might also be pointed out that one of the things pushing collector car prices up, depending on what they are, is that they have turned out to be relatively solid investments with returns ballparking around six percent per year, according to some estimates.
Seems to me it boils down to a simple question: If you were a really rich guy, would you rather have a stack of gold ingots sitting in a vault someplace, or a Ferrari 250 GTO you could wheel out of a garage some moonlit night, and drop the hammer on a long and winding road?
If you’re an unrepentant motorhead, that would include myself, the choice is real clear. If you’re not, no harm no foul.
Perry Gaskill: that car wouldn’t be worth $35M if it were made out of 24kt gold.
Literally.
The Ferrari 250 GTO’s curb weight is given as 880kg. That includes full tank of fuel and all necessary fluids. Allowing 80kg for full tank of fuel (est 20 gal), coolant (20 qts), and oil (1 gal), plus brake fluid, transmission oil, etc . . . , that leaves around 800kg for the dry weight of the car itself.
Gold’s bullion price is currently $41,952 per kilogram. That means 800kg of gold isn’t even worth what the man paid for the car. The gold is worth over $1 million less.
When someone literally pays more for a car than its weight in gold bullion would cost, they are freaking crazy. Period.
I can understand why you think it’s weird, Hondo, but would point out that the buyer likely isn’t too crazy because if he was he wouldn’t have $35 million to spend on the thing.
It’s also real hard to get 800 Kg of gold bricks up to 160 mph. And the handling is terrible.
Then too, what happens if in a few years the guy flips the Ferrari at auction for $50 million? Does that mean he’s still crazy?
Still another question: Let’s say you had $1 Billion in gold bars sitting in a bank, but one day happened to find $35 million in loose change under your couch cushions. What would you do with it? Buy more gold?
Perry Gaskill: still not buying those arguments.
1. Having money alone guarantees neither superior intellect nor sanity. Ever hear of inherited wealth or blind luck?
2. There are several Porsches (and quite a few others) available on the market today for far less than $1M that both go faster and handle better. I believe that even Ferrari makes a few of those.
3. Were I ever that wealthy, I think I’d be far more likely to emulate Gates (the Microsoft guy) and donate $35M in “found money” to some charitable foundation in order to accomplish something of actual worth to society. I don’t think I’d blow that $35M on buying a toy that’s overpriced by, oh, a factor of maybe 35 or more.
4. There’s no guarantee the new owner will be able to sell it for $50M down the road – or even recover his investment once inflation is factored in. Bubbles burst. Ask anyone who owns property these days about that.
Hey, I get it that it’s his money. Still: all this guy did was blow millions just to feed his ego. Spending more on a car than it would cost to buy the equivalent weight in gold is IMO freaking stupid – no matter how beautiful, historic, or nice the vehicle may be.
Hondo: The only thing I see in what this guy did is possibly as an investment. Betting on the come that in 5 years or so he’ll get %25 to %50 more for it at another auction. Most of the few collectors I know are investors first. Now this guy may just be a fool with too much money to know what to do with but I don’t know. If I had that kind of wealth, I am on board with your ideas of how to use it or rather give it, first. After all, the nominal interest alone on one tenth of that amount would be more than I could ever spend in my life. How much does a person really need?
And here I am trying to figure out where I can squeeze $900.00 out of the budget to buy that Colt Delta .10mm I saw at the local gunshow this morning
There was an interview with noted collector Jay Leno last night at that vary venue. He said that the middle east is the source of this collector car bubble. It seems that there is a guy from Saudi Arabia or Abu Dhabi that buys every Aston Martin DB-5 that hits the market. He has something like 214 of them. That, to me is borderline obsessive. My wife looked at me funny when I dragged my third MGB home. I know a guy who has one of each generation of Corvettes from the first to the fifth. He may have a sixth gen by now. Collectors are not the same as speculators in my book. It’s a real bitch to try to out bid the flippers and speculators at the auctions. All you can do is hope they choke on their greed.
If the car found a buyer at $38 million, it’s worth $38 million. If the current buying bubble holds for even a few more years, it will easily become a $50 million car. It may be insane, but money is just an agreed medium of exchange. Note that there had to be TWO fools – the bidding did not get to $38M because just one guy wanted it; he was bidding against another willing buyer. Any medium of exchange, whether gold, cars, paper bills, whatever, is only worth what two people agree it is worth.
Sure, David. Just like some tulip bulbs in early 1637 were “worth” more than 10x the wages of a skilled craftsman.
They weren’t bringing that price a few months later.
The cost of an item is sometimes only very loosely related to its actual worth (intrinsic value). When the perceived value far outstrips intrinsic worth, it’s called a “bubble” condition.
Bubbles burst. And depending on one to continue indefinitely (AKA treating the greater fool theory as a universal, unchanging truth) is, well, stupid.