Zuckerberg’s $2 Million Watch Overshadowed His AI Medical Research Announcement, And Collectors Aren’t Complaining

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on the ‘No Priors’ podcast was billed as a conversation about artificial intelligence and medicine. He and his wife Priscilla Chan discussed Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative-funded facility using AI to identify, treat and eventually eradicate human diseases. Instead, much of the reaction online focused on the watch on his wrist.

Watch experts quickly identified it as a vintage Rolex Reference 6062, nicknamed the ‘Stelline,’ produced for only a brief window around 1950. It stands as one of just two Rolex models ever fitted with both an automatic triple calendar and an integrated moonphase complication, the other being the Reference 8171, running on the brand’s calibre 9¾ movement in a 36mm Oyster case.

Top-condition examples of the Stelline have sold for as much as $2 million at auction. Christie’s sold a pink gold version in 2023 for 2.2 million Swiss francs, about $2.7 million, while a rarer black-dial, diamond-marker variant went for $6.2 million last year, one of the highest prices ever recorded for a Rolex at a public sale.

Zuckerberg, whose fortune is estimated at $200 billion, has assembled a notable watch collection in recent years, including a Patek Philippe Reference 5236P worn in a September 2024 Instagram post, a De Bethune DB25 Starry Varius worth over $80,000, and a Greubel Forsey piece worth more than $900,000 shown in a January 2025 video.

The juxtaposition of a decades-old mechanical timepiece alongside a discussion of AI’s role in curing disease made for an unlikely talking point in an interview that was supposed to be about neither watches nor wealth.