Watch Paparazzi

Musician DJ Khaled spotted wearing Jacob & Co

DJ Khaled has never been shy about his relationship with Jacob & Co, but this sighting cuts through even his own considerable watch portfolio. Photographed with his right hand raised near his face — inadvertently framing the watch in full view — Khaled is wearing one of the most stone-intensive flying tourbillons ever produced by the New York-based manufacture: the Brilliant Flying Tourbillon fully set with 351 baguette-cut tsavorite garnets on a custom green crocodile strap.

The Brilliant Flying Tourbillon, reference BT543.40.TS.TS.A, houses Jacob & Co's in-house JCAM09 hand-wound movement, beating at 21,600 vph with a 72-hour power reserve. The movement's defining complication is a flying tourbillon — meaning the cage rotates without an upper bridge, creating the illusion that it floats freely within the dial. At 47mm in 18K yellow gold, the case itself is almost secondary to the gem architecture: baguette tsavorites tile every surface from bezel to dial in a centrifugal pattern, each stone hand-selected for matching color saturation and cut to fit the radial geometry. The result is a coherent green canvas interrupted only by the rose-gold tourbillon cage and matching applied J&Co logo.

From a collector standpoint, this reference occupies a unique intersection. Tsavorite — a rare grossular garnet from East Africa — is considerably harder to source in matched baguette form than emerald, making this setting exercise genuinely scarce beyond the 18-piece production limit. The flying tourbillon complication, combined with factory gem-setting at this density, represents a technical commitment that separates it from aftermarket-stoned timepieces that dominate the celebrity watch space.

Khaled has worn Jacob & Co publicly since at least the mid-2010s and is closely identified with the brand's Astronomia and Billionaire lines. This Brilliant Flying Tourbillon, however, is a quieter flex in format — round where the Astronomia is theatrical — but louder in material terms. It sits alongside pieces like the Billionaire Timeless Treasure as evidence that Khaled's collection is curated with genuine brand depth rather than impulse.

At a listed retail of approximately $630,000 and limited to 18 examples, grey-market liquidity is essentially theoretical — pieces of this rarity trade privately, if at all, and typically command premiums over retail when they surface. For collectors tracking stone-set tourbillons at this level, the Brilliant Flying Tourbillon tsavorite remains one of Jacob & Co's most coherent executions of its gemological ambitions.