Watch Paparazzi

Entrepreneur Steven Zhang spotted wearing Richard Mille

Steven Zhang, the 32-year-old chairman of Serie A giants Inter Milan and son of Suning Commerce founder Zhang Jindong, was recently spotted wearing one of the rarest and most expensive wristwatches in existence: the Richard Mille RM 52-05 Tourbillon Pharrell Williams in full sapphire. At a listed price of $6,300,000 USD, it sits firmly among the costliest watches ever offered by the Le Brassus manufacture — and among the most technically complex objects in contemporary watchmaking.

The RM 52-05 was unveiled as a direct collaboration between Richard Mille and musician-producer-designer Pharrell Williams, extending a creative partnership that began with earlier RM 52 skull-motif references. The defining feature is the case: machined entirely from monobloc sapphire crystal, a material with a Vickers hardness of approximately 2,000 HV, making it nearly impossible to scratch and extraordinarily difficult to manufacture. Case production alone requires hundreds of hours of CNC milling and polishing, with a significant rejection rate that contributes directly to the watch's extreme price point and near-mythical scarcity.

Inside beats a manually wound tourbillon movement — the caliber RM52-05 — visible from virtually every angle through the transparent sapphire architecture. The three-dimensional skull at the dial's center is hand-crafted from grade 5 titanium, then skeletonized and finished by hand, with Pharrell Williams' signature integrated into the design. The movement delivers approximately 70 hours of power reserve and is constructed to Richard Mille's signature standards of extreme lightness and shock resistance. Production numbers are not officially disclosed, but informed estimates place the total edition in the single digits.

For collectors, the RM 52-05 Pharrell Williams Sapphire occupies rarefied territory alongside references like the RM 56-02 and RM 27-04 as proof-of-concept pieces that push manufacturing capability to its absolute limit. The sapphire case, the celebrity co-signature, and the skull motif — itself a recurring theme across Richard Mille's tourbillon catalog — combine to produce a reference that trades less on technical function than on artistic and industrial ambition.

Zhang's affinity for ultra-high-end timepieces is well established, befitting his position as one of the most prominent young businessmen operating across European football and Chinese commerce. Spotting the RM 52-05 Pharrell Williams Sapphire on his wrist confirms what the watch world already suspected: this is a piece owned by an extraordinarily small circle, and Zhang is firmly inside it.