The 10 biggest charity auction lots of all time

A charity auction is an odd sort of market. The object on the block is often beside the point. What the room is buying is the chance to do something visible for a cause, in front of people whose opinion it cares about.

One rule decides the list: a lot counts if it was given away in order to raise money, whether built for the sale, donated to it, or consigned by an owner who directed the proceeds to a cause. Estates sold off after a death are a different thing, and far larger. They get a section of their own below rather than being quietly left out.

1. Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé — $142 million (€135 million)

Sold by RM Sotheby's at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart on 5 May 2022, and still the highest price ever paid for a motor car. One of two prototypes built in 1955, it had never been offered before. The proceeds established the Mercedes-Benz Fund, which pays for environmental science scholarships.

2. The first printing of the US Constitution — $43.2 million

Sotheby's, New York, 18 November 2021, sold to benefit the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation. One of eleven surviving copies of the official first printing, and the only one in private hands, it made twice its high estimate and set a record for any printed document. The underbidder was a crowd of seventeen thousand strangers who pooled the money in a week.

3. Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300A-010 — $31 million (CHF 31 million)

Christie's, Geneva, November 2019, at the Only Watch charity sale, and still the highest price paid for a wristwatch at auction. Patek Philippe does not make its grand complications in stainless steel, and this is the one that is. Ninety-nine per cent of the proceeds went to Duchenne muscular dystrophy research.

4. A seat on Blue Origin's first crewed flight — $28 million

Sold on 12 June 2021 in a live auction that ran under seven minutes, opening at $4.8 million. The winning bid went to Club for the Future, Blue Origin's foundation, which passed it to nineteen space charities. The winner, later named as Justin Sun, could not make the July flight, and an eighteen-year-old took the seat.

5. Ferrari Daytona SP3 "Tailor Made" — $26 million

RM Sotheby's, Monterey, August 2025, the highest price ever paid at auction for a new Ferrari. The SP3 ran to 599 cars and was long sold out, so Ferrari built one more, the 599+1, for the Ferrari Foundation, and RM Sotheby's waived its commission. Ferrari had done this twice before, with a 500th LaFerrari in 2016 and a 210th Aperta in 2017.

6. Banksy, Game Changer — $23 million (£16.8 million)

Christie's, London, 23 March 2021. Banksy painted it during the first wave of the pandemic and left it in University Hospital Southampton for the staff. Sold for health charities, it took £16,758,000 with premium, nearly double the artist's previous auction record, and Christie's gave away much of its own premium too.

7. Lunch with Warren Buffett — $19,000,100

The last of eighteen annual lunches auctioned for GLIDE, a San Francisco charity working on hunger and homelessness, closed on eBay in June 2022. The anonymous winner got a meal at a New York steakhouse with Buffett and up to seven guests. The eighteen lunches together raised more than $53 million.

8. The "Lady Blunt" Stradivarius — $15.9 million (£9.8 million)

Sold online by Tarisio on 20 June 2011, four times the previous auction record for a Stradivari violin. The Nippon Music Foundation offered it after the earthquake and tsunami of March that year and gave the whole proceeds to its relief fund for north-eastern Japan.

9. Dubai number plate "P 7" — $15 million (AED 55 million)

Sold by Emirates Auction on 8 April 2023 at the Most Noble Numbers sale, a world record for a registration plate. Bidding opened at fifteen million dirhams and passed thirty million within seconds. The proceeds went to the One Billion Meals Endowment, a food aid fund.

10. A Patek Philippe desk clock — $10.4 million (CHF 9.5 million)

The top lot of Only Watch 2021 in Geneva. Only Watch works because every piece in it is made once and cannot be ordered afterwards at any price.

The estates, which are bigger and are not the same thing

If the rule were only that the money reached a cause, the top of this page would be paintings. Christie's sold the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller in May 2018 for $832.6 million, proceeds to more than a dozen charities. It is the largest charity auction ever held, and its top lot, Picasso's Fillette à la corbeille fleurie, took $115 million with fees. In November 2022 the Paul Allen collection made $1.62 billion at Christie's in one evening, net proceeds to philanthropy; the Seurat alone took $149.2 million, more than the Mercedes.

They sit apart because nobody gave those pictures away to raise money. They were sold because their owners had died, and where the money went was a decision about an estate rather than about a lot. One is a bequest; the other is twenty people persuaded to part with something. If your evening leans towards pictures, see the page on art auctions.

What the ten have in common

Not one of them had a price before the auction. There is no list price for a steel Grandmaster Chime, a 600th Daytona SP3, a seat on a rocket or an afternoon with Warren Buffett, because until the sale was announced none of those things existed. Seven of the ten were made or released for the occasion; the other three were single surviving objects with nothing comparable on the market. It is also why the two lots with no object at all sit so high: they cost their donors an afternoon and a seat that was flying anyway.

What a hundred-person committee can take from this

No club can donate a Ferrari. Every club can manufacture something that exists only at its own auction, and that is the most transferable idea here. A morning on the boat of the member who never takes anyone out. The head teacher taking a lesson. A named seat, a named tree, a named award. None of it costs the donor money, and none of it can be bought anywhere else.

Donated retail goods do the opposite. A voucher or a boxed gadget has a price the room already knows, and bidding stops just below it. If a guest can look the lot up, they will, and that lookup becomes your ceiling. The guide covers building a lot list on that basis, and the page for charities and galas how it fits a fixed programme.

Every price above came from two bidders who both refused to lose, and it came at the end: the Blue Origin seat went from $4.8 million to $28 million in under seven minutes. If lots close on a fixed second, the person still deciding never gets to. A late bid should extend a lot rather than end it, as on the how it works page.

One last thing, because it is the failure nobody plans for. In March 2021 the world's largest canvas painting, Sacha Jafri's The Journey of Humanity, sold at a charity event in Dubai for $62 million, intended for Unicef, Unesco and two other bodies. Years later the charities had still not been paid and the matter was in court. A hammer price is not money. Settle how and when the winner pays before the lot opens. There is a walk-through at getting started, and answers in the help centre.

Prices as reported at the time of sale, including buyer's premium where stated.