Tiffany Lamp Coveted by Steve Jobs Sells for $4.4m

Posted20 days agoActive20 days ago

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Discussion (4 comments)

Showing 12 comments

netsharc

20 days ago

4 replies

How much of the price can be attributed to "Steve Jobs coveted after this lamp"?

Obviously celebrity endorsements is nothing new, but "coveting" seems new to me. Imagine if it's Trump, Musk or your favorite dickhead celebrity coveting after the object, would you say "eww" or would you pay more to say "I own something that dickhead covets."?

schmookeeg

20 days ago

1 reply

I would think there is some >0 value, if only to find the coveting person and destroy the object in front of them.

People with 4MM lamp money have grand scope for their spitefulness :)

IAmBroom

20 days ago

Gonna be hard for Jobs' haters to do that...

pengaru

20 days ago

What's particularly noteworthy of Jobs owning something like this is he was famous for not really having many possessions. His Woodside mansion was supposedly largely empty... the photo of him in TFA corroborates it; note the sparseness of the room he's sitting next to the lamp in.

kirykl

20 days ago

Cash would seem to fit for all

ortusdux

20 days ago

When your customer pool is 'people with $4m to spend on a lamp', the fact that a very wealthy person considered it valuable probably holds some sway.

bsammon

20 days ago

1 reply

The article says that Jobs owned a lamp like this in 1982.

Questions that come to mind:

Was Steve Jobs rich in 1982?

In 1982, was the cost of a "real" Tiffany lamp within the reach of someone at Jobs's 1982 wealth/income level?

What are the chances that the item Jobs owned was a knockoff or a mass-produced item?

I imagine that Steve Jobs was the kind of person who would buy a $5000 lamp even if he was only making $20,000 a year.

bsammon

20 days ago

1 reply

Ah... okay, some quick research says the Apple IPO was in 1980, so he was (at least somewhat) rich.

pengaru

20 days ago

from his wikipedia page:

  > In 1978, at age 23, Jobs was worth over $1 million (equivalent to $4.82
  > million in 2024). By age 25, his net worth grew to an estimated $250 million
  > (equivalent to $865 million in 2024). He was also one of the youngest "people
  > ever to make the Forbes list of the nation's richest people—and one of only a
  > handful to have done it themselves, without inherited wealth".[97] In 1982,
  > Jobs bought an apartment on the top two floors of The San Remo, a Manhattan
  > building with a politically progressive reputation. Although he never lived
  > there,[98] he spent years renovating it thanks to I. M. Pei.

OptionOfT

20 days ago

https://archive.ph/ehKT0

politelemon

20 days ago

Not an interesting hn submission, this is little more than a celebrity worship entry of no value.

bsammon

20 days ago

This headline sounds like "this specific (one-of-a-kind?) item that Steve Jobs owned/wanted to own" when the article is really about "this lamp that is the same design as one Steve Jobs owned"

So not the "someone paid $4million for an (specific) item with a celebrity connection" that I thought it was.

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ID: 46302346Type: storyLast synced: 12/17/2025, 5:45:41 PM

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