Watch Paparazzi

Rapper Jay-Z spotted wearing Richard Mille

Jay-Z was photographed wearing one of the rarest wristwatches on earth: the White TPT Richard Mille RM27-01 Tourbillon, a reference limited to just five examples worldwide. For a collector whose relationship with Richard Mille is well established, this represents a significant escalation — even by his own elevated standards.

The Richard Mille RM27-01 was developed in close collaboration with tennis champion Rafael Nadal and introduced in 2013 as the successor to the RM027. Its defining engineering achievement is a tourbillon movement suspended within a case by a cable system — four braided steel cables, each just 0.35mm in diameter, that hold the movement in tension rather than rigidly mounting it. This architecture allows the watch to absorb the punishing shock loads of professional tennis, verified at over 1,000g, without damage to the escapement or tourbillon cage. The manual-winding caliber RM27-01 operates at 21,600 vph and delivers approximately 70 hours of power reserve.

The White TPT case takes an already exceptional reference into a different category entirely. TPT — Thin Ply Technology — is a composite material borrowed from aerospace and America's Cup yacht construction, built from layers of quartz or carbon filaments infused with resin and oriented at 45-degree angles. The white variant incorporates silica filaments, producing a distinctive striated ivory-white surface that is simultaneously lighter and harder than titanium. With production limited to five pieces globally, the White TPT RM27-01 is less a watch than a numbered artifact.

Jay-Z has worn Richard Mille references publicly since at least the early 2010s, and has been associated with RM 69, RM 52, and various skeletonized complications. His taste consistently skews toward the most technically and visually radical examples in the catalog, making the RM27-01 a coherent — if staggering — choice.

At a UK list price of £800,000, the Richard Mille RM27-01 in White TPT sits in a tier occupied by very few production wristwatches. On the secondary market, five-piece-limited Richard Mille tourbillons in exotic case materials have historically traded well above retail when they surface at auction, with comparable references reaching seven figures at Christie's and Phillips. Confirmed sales data for this specific variant remain scarce, precisely because so few exist and fewer still change hands publicly.