Entrepreneur Benoit Defforge spotted wearing a Richard Mille

Spotted on the wrist of Benoit Defforge, Managing Director of Airbus Corporate Jets, the Richard Mille RM62-01 Tourbillon Alarm ACJ in NTPT carbon is not a watch you encounter casually — with a production run of just 30 pieces, the odds of seeing one in the wild are exceptionally slim. Defforge's connection to the piece is about as direct as it gets: his company co-developed it.

The RM62-01 stands as the most complicated watch Richard Mille has ever released. Its manually wound calibre RMAC3 packs 816 components into a case that measures 50mm × 42.7mm × 20mm — dimensions that would feel excessive on lesser movements but here serve a genuine mechanical purpose. The complication list is formidable: a flying tourbillon, a vibrating wrist alarm (achieved via an oscillating mass rather than an audible bell, making it practical at 40,000 feet), a function selector, a torque indicator, and a power reserve display. The movement runs at 21,600 vph with a 38-hour power reserve, and achieving that with this level of complexity required years of development.

The case material is NTPT carbon — North Thin Ply Technology — a composite layered from carbon fibre plies oriented at 45-degree angles and resin-impregnated under heat and pressure. The result is a material lighter than titanium, harder than steel in its resistance to deformation, and visually distinctive with its flowing wood-grain-like striations. No two cases look identical. Richard Mille has used NTPT extensively, but the RM62-01 represents its most technically ambitious application.

The ACJ partnership is thematically coherent. Airbus Corporate Jets builds the ACJ TwoTwenty and ACJ320neo family — ultra-long-range private jets where silence, discretion, and precision engineering are paramount. A silent vibrating alarm in a tourbillon wristwatch maps directly onto that philosophy. Defforge wearing the RM62-01 is less celebrity endorsement and more a founder wearing his own product.

At retail, the RM62-01 Tourbillon Alarm ACJ in NTPT carbon was listed at approximately $1,000,000 USD. On the secondary market, the combination of a 30-piece limit, institutional provenance, and mechanical singularity means transaction prices, where they occur, exceed that figure. This is not a watch that trades frequently — and that scarcity is part of the point.