First, it’s important to note that this probably doesn’t make any sense. A playing card with a cartoon yellow mouse on it that was about the size of a business card just sold for $16,492,000. Goldin is one of the most well-known auction houses in the United States for collecting things. After 41 days of bidding, the winning bid came in. As soon as the hammer hit the ground, confetti all over the place, and a Guinness World Records official made it official.
This is the Pikachu Illustrator card, which most people who aren’t card collectors have never heard of. It was never bought in stores. It was never part of a set of rules. Most estimates say that about 40 of these cards were given away as prizes in a Japanese drawing contest put on by CoroCoro Comic magazine in 1998. The card was drawn by Atsuko Nishida, who is known as the designer who created Pikachu. Just that beginning story makes it stand out. Logan Paul’s copy, on the other hand, was worth as much as it was because it is the only copy in the world with a PSA 10 grade. A score of 100. There is no edge wear, print flaws, or marks. His was the only card that was thought to be almost perfect out of a group of cards that were already very rare.
Paul paid a record $5.275 million for it in 2021. It wasn’t locked up. When he walked into WrestleMania 38 in Texas for his WWE debut, he wore it around his neck in a gold case that was made just for it. That picture of a man wearing a $5 million card to a wrestling match said something about Paul and maybe also about how people thought the world of collectibles had changed. These things were no longer just assets. They were just parts of a bigger story about me.
There was some coverage of the sale on Netflix’s King of Collectibles: The Goldin Touch. Goldin CEO Ken Goldin worked hard to get Paul to let the card go to auction. Goldin told him, “The Pokémon market is cooking.” As usual, Paul was honest and said that the cash would help. He was making plans for a fancy wedding. In August 2025, he would marry Danish model Nina Agdal in Lake Como. In a way, the card helped pay for the event.
AJ Scaramucci, a venture capitalist and son of Anthony Scaramucci, the financier who was White House communications director for a short time, won the bid. When Scaramucci bought something, it wasn’t thought of as a normal investment, which is what makes it interesting. He called it the first step in what he called a “planetary treasure hunt“—a search for unique, unreplaceable items. A fossil of a T-Rex. A copy of the American Declaration of Independence ($). As the first move, use the Pikachu Illustrator card. It’s a strange vision that makes me not sure what to think. That being said, it does show that the people who set the most expensive items in the collectibles market aren’t always collectors in the usual sense. They’re making something else, like a personal mythology or a collection of unique things that can’t be made again.
The fact that this sale is happening is quietly important for the market as a whole. Since around 2020, when nostalgia for the pandemic and social media attention brought the category into the mainstream of investment conversations, Pokémon cards have been selling for a lot of money. However, a $16.5 million card is a different kind of big deal. No longer is it a story about collectors for fun or even for real. It’s about a single thing that has the kind of value that was once only found in Old Masters paintings or museum-quality artifacts. It’s really not clear if that will hold or if the market will stay at this level. But for now, a contest prize from 1998 is sitting somewhere in the world in a case covered in diamonds. It cost more than most people will ever earn in their whole lives.
