Josh Bonifas is used to tech company founders, investors and employees coming into his store and dropping big money. The owner of Fourtané Jewelers in Carmel, an authorized retailer of Rolex and Patek Philippe, Bonifas says Silicon Valley watch geeks make up a big portion of his clientele.
A few months ago, he started noticing something unusual. Customers began sending him pictures of watches worn by Mark Zuckerberg. They showed the Meta CEO wearing a series of classic, elegant and, above all, expensive timepieces.
“His choices were interesting and impressive,” said Bonifas.
Zuckerberg has long been something of an unlikely lifestyle icon. For years, he was known for sticking to a rigid formula of jeans and a gray T-shirt (albeit a $300 Brunello Cucinelli model), inspiring would-be Zucks to adopt similar uniforms. More recently, he has upgraded his look with a jiu jitsu-carved physique, a shock of surfer curls, and a hypebeast wardrobe that includes custom oversize T-shirts and gold necklaces.
And now, the pièce de résistance: a multimillion-dollar watch collection that has fans and experts drooling with envy.
“Mark is an influencer — a hell of an influencer,” said Roman Sharf, owner of retailer Luxury Bazaar, who has witnessed the direct influence Zuckerberg is having on watch markets.
Zuckerberg’s watch journey began on a March trip to India to attend a pre-wedding party for billionaire heir Anant Ambani. In a viral video, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, admire Ambani’s watch, a custom Richard Mille RM 30-01 estimated to have cost $1.5 million.
“You know, I never really wanted a watch,” Zuckerberg says in the video, “But after seeing that, I was like, ‘Watches are cool.’”
Zuckerberg visibly fawning over the ultimate rich-guy flex watch — worn by the likes of Jay-Z, Pharrell Williams, and Rafael Nadal — was a “cultural touchstone moment” for the usually discreet Silicon Valley watch world, Bay Area-based dealer Eric Ku said.
Since that initiation, Zuckerberg has expanded his collection to include Patek Philippe, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and two pieces by F.P. Journe.
Perhaps most surprising to the luxury timepiece mafia, Zuckerberg has purchased a De Bethune — a “critical darling of watch nerds,” according to Ku.
“They’re not your big-box Rolex watches,” Ku said. “The average person with a cursory knowledge of watches would not know about these.”
Sharf said part of the appeal is that the billionaire tech titan isn’t being paid to wear a brand, like other celebrities. Sharf likened the Zuckerberg effect to when Kanye West wore a Cartier Crash on David Letterman’s Netflix special, kicking off a frenzy in vintage Cartier markets.
Sharf added that Zuckerberg is part of an emerging trend of pairing casual looks with high-end timepieces.
“He’s going to solidify the trend of wearing fancy watches with T-shirts and flip-flops,” Sharf said. He suspects that in Silicon Valley, tech employees who would otherwise wear Apple smartwatches with Patagonia vests will feel more comfortable showing off their snazzy timepieces knowing Zuck has their back.
“He’s one of the tech gods everyone looks up to,” Bonifas said.
Zuckerberg certainly isn’t the first tech founder to wear fancy watches. As Bay Area industry veteran Zach Piña notes, “There’s always been big fish buying big-fish watches.” But unlike the in-your-face glitz of New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, the Bay Area watch market is restrained.
“Quiet luxury and stealth wealth has long been part of the tech community and Silicon Valley as a whole,” Piña said.
Techies have long had a special relationship with watches. Engineers appreciate their mechanical precision; designers are attracted to their artistry and permanence.
“There’s a planned obsolescence baked into tech, and people who gravitate toward mechanical watches are trying to buck that,” Piña said. “There’s an old-world romance to it.”
Whether Zuckerberg knows it or not, he has become a central figure in Silicon Valley’s long-gestating watch culture. Meta has a thriving watch community internally, and several Big Tech companies have Slack channels with hundreds of active members dedicated to sharing their recent acquisitions. (Whether Zuckerberg plans to join his company’s group for watch enthusiasts is not known.)
At Google, employees have organized watch-buying trips to Switzerland and commissioned Tudor, the sister company of Rolex, to make 260 custom watches with the tech company’s colors on the dial and the numerical formula for a googol (one followed by 100 zeros) on the back.
Sharf, meanwhile, is regularly fielding calls about the watches worn by Zuckerberg. Three days after Zuckerberg was spotted wearing an F.P. Journe Centigraphe Sport, Sharf sold the same model. Retail price: $165,000.