Billionaire Ken Griffin has paid nearly $45m to own his own 150 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton.
The Citadel boss, 55, purchased a late-Jurassic stegosaurus skeleton for $44.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York City on Wednesday – a record-setting sum in dinosaur collecting.
The stegosaurus, named ‘Apex,’ is 11 feet tall and nearly 27 feet and has been called the ‘finest stegosaurus specimen ever to appear at auction.’
The skeleton was expected to sell for about $6million, with Griffin winning the live auction after competing with six other bidders for 15 minutes, as reported by CNBC.
Griffin reportedly plans to explore lending the specimen to a US institution.
‘Apex was born in America and is going to stay in America!’ Griffin said after his winning bid.
Sotheby’s said Apex shows no signs of combat-related injuries or evidence of post-mortem scavenging.
The previous record for the most expensive dinosaur was over $10million.
Apex was discovered by paleontologist Jason Cooper near town of Dinosaur, Colorado, according to QUARTZ.
Griffin has a history of bidding on historical and archeological items.
In 2021, Griffin shelled out $43.2 million for a rare first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction, outbidding a band of more than 17,000 cryptocurrency investors.
The crypto enthusiasts had crowdfunded more than $40 million worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum though a spirited social media campaign earlier in the week.
Griffin’s winning bid came after an eight-minute battle with the coalition of cryptocurrency fanatics, and it more than doubled the $20 million that the document was thought to be worth – setting a world auction record for any book, manuscript, historical document or printed text.
The document, one of only 11 known surviving copies of the U.S. charter, was signed on September 17, 1787, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall by famed American founding fathers including Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison.