Rapper Tyga spotted wearing a Jacob & Co

Tyga posted an Instagram story from Tokyo, Japan, offering a close-up wrist shot of one of the most stone-intensive watches currently produced: the Jacob & Co Royal Baguette in 18K white gold, invisibly set with 379 baguette-cut white diamonds. The caption — 'Time is money' — was characteristically brief, but the watch did the talking.

The Royal Baguette represents Jacob & Co's apex expression of gem-setting craft. Invisible setting, technically known as serti invisible, requires each baguette to be grooved and slid onto a hidden rail system so that the metal substrate entirely disappears beneath a continuous field of stone. On the Royal Baguette, this treatment extends from the radial dial — where concentric rows of baguettes fan outward from a central cluster — through the bezel, case flanks, lugs and crown guards. The total stone count of 379 baguette diamonds covers virtually every external surface. The movement housed within the 47mm white-gold case is a Jacob & Co proprietary automatic, delivered on a rich burgundy alligator strap visible in both the Instagram post and the reference image.

Production is capped at 18 pieces globally, a figure that situates the Royal Baguette firmly in the territory of museum-grade complications rather than commercial catalogue watches. The limitation is not marketing artifice: the invisible-setting process is genuinely constrained by the number of master gem-setters capable of executing it to the standard required, with each piece demanding an estimated 1,500 hours of atelier work.

For collectors, the Royal Baguette occupies a specific niche — it is not a complication watch in the mechanical sense, but a monument to lapidary technique. Its peer group includes the Graff Diamonds Hallucination and certain Chopard Red Carpet pieces. On the secondary market, transactions are largely private, but the £450,000 UK list price anchors expectations firmly above $550,000 USD at current exchange rates.

Tyga has maintained one of the more consistently high-profile watch wardrobes in hip-hop, with previous sightings spanning Patek Philippe and Richard Mille references. The Royal Baguette, however, is a statement of a different register — less about movement prestige, more about the sheer density of craft embedded in the object. Eighteen exist. Tyga appears to have one of them.