Inside Jay-Z’s World-Class Watch Collection

In the late 1990s, Jay-Z was ushered into a vault room at an unspecified location—“one of these buildings I didn’t know existed,” as he mysteriously describes it—and reemerged with an exceedingly rare Audemars Piguet watch. This is the type of person Jay has been for decades: a man for whom the doors of top secret vaults swing open like they’ve just been doused with WD-40.

So, not long afterward, when he and his crew were initially refused entry to a jewelry store in a ski resort town, it came as a shock. “I don’t have enough eyes to watch all of them,” Jay remembers the shopkeeper saying. Right then, a couple—white, of course, and dressed for the slopes—rang the boutique’s bell and got a different answer. Once the couple were allowed in, Jay-Z and his group couldn’t be kept out. “Now the store’s open, everyone’s opening drawers, and we want to see, too, so we’re looking over their shoulders,” Jay says. When the other customer took off the watch he was wearing in order to try on a new one, Jay asked to see it too. “The [sales] guy looks at me like it’s too late now,” he recalls. “He can’t deny me.”

That’s when Jay pulled back his sleeve, revealed his new AP, and dropped it in a tray on the

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counter. The salesperson jumped back in awe, Jay says, before he started “naming off all the things of the watch I didn’t even know.” The customer, meanwhile, had only one question: How much was it? The answer made him clutch the woman he was with and exit the boutique. That was the first time, Jay says, he understood that these objects were more than just timepieces. “I definitely walked out the store saying the Audemars Piguet was worth every dollar,” he says. “Just that feeling in that moment where it put everybody on an equal playing field. That began the experience, and then I fell in love with the craftsmanship.”

Since that visit to the jewelry store decades ago, Jay has amassed one of the most impressive watch collections in the world. He collaborated with Audemars Piguet and Hublot back when official partnerships between Swiss luxury watchmakers and pop-culture figures barely existed. He’s even a one-time WatchTime magazine cover star. Long before watch collecting hit the mainstream, Jay-Z was rapping lines that could’ve reasonably been found on a watch-enthusiast forum: “I don’t got the bright watch, I got the right watch,” he spits on 2006’s “30 Something.”

Today, his collection includes everything from the rarest vintage Patek Philippes and Rolexes to one-of-one, ultramodern Richard Milles that required four years to construct. “His palate is just phenomenal,” says the watch adviser Alex Todd, who works with the rapper. Jay-Z’s interest in watches is spurred by their versatility, Todd tells me. “It’s just something that you can enjoy in multiple ways,” he says. “You can’t put a piece of art on your wrist and take it with you.”

For our cover shoot, Jay brought along a small selection of timepieces that shows the range of his collection and his deep appreciation for the art form. Here’s a closer look at each.

Rolex Cosmograph Daytona 6264 “John Player Special”