Former Dragon’s Den star Kevin O’Leary has stepped forward to reveal himself as one of the new owners of a one-of-a-kind trading card signed by basketball greats Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant – now the most valuable sports card ever sold at auction.
The card – signed by both Jordan and Bryant and containing the NBA logo from their jerseys – sold Saturday for a whopping $12.932 million. The buyer was not revealed at the time.
But appearing on CNBC Monday, O’Leary said he bought the card as part of a trio with fellow investors Matt Allen and Paul Warshaw.
“We formed a syndicate so we didn’t have to compete with each other,” O’Leary told CNBC.
Allen did most of the research, but convinced O’Leary that the card was a worthwhile purchase.
“We bought it together. Yes, we did, and I’m very proud to own it,” O’Leary said. “I’ve been looking at this asset class now for three years.”
He said the rarest pieces of art tend to net “extraordinary capital gains,” according to his research.
While Allen and Warshaw are “crazy hobbyists,” O’Leary said he’s the analytical one in the group, noting that extremely rare items such as the Bryant-Jordan card tend to “defy recessions.”
The three men stayed up until 3 a.m. Saturday morning, fending off other would-be-buyers in an auction that drew 82 bids.
While he’s proud to own it, O’Leary said it’s unlikely he’ll spend much time with the card.
“These cards stay in vaults in perpetuity. I mean, I may handle it once in my life, but it’s an image that is passed around digitally,” he said.
As for when someone else might get a chance to buy it, O’Leary said that could be a very long time.
“I don’t think this piece will come to market again during my lifetime,” he said. “It’s going to be a part of an index that I’m going to continue to grow along with my partners. We look at it no different than our Bitcoin holdings, our Ethereum holdings, our gold holdings.”
The previous record for the most money ever paid for a sports card at auction was a 1952 Micky Mantle card, which sold for $12.6 million in 2022, according to Heritage Auctions.
The auction house said the “Dual NBA Logo Autographs” series to which the Bryant-Jordan card belongs ran from 2004 through 2009 and was produced in limited editions of one, although players often appeared in multiple different pairings.
The golden NBA logo on the card comes from the jersey Jordan wore in his 1996-97 season with the Chicago Bulls, in which he won the penultimate NBA Championship of his career.
