When it comes to the hierarchy of banality, the observation “You know, I never really wanted to get a watch, but after seeing that, I was like, ‘Watches are cool,’” is a blandishment so … well … bland as to scale new heights of inconsequentiality and open new vistas of triviality. But when you understand that these words were spoken by Mark Zuckerberg of a Richard Mille being worn by Anant Ambani, the triangulation is such that this sentence assumes an importance far beyond its apparent meaning.
If you are even remotely aware of the Gilded Age–like explosion (and disparity) of wealth that has led to Narendra Modi’s India being known as “the Billionaire Raj,” then you will know Mukesh Ambani and his family for their idiosyncratic Mumbai skyscraper, built for one family and almost twice as tall as Big Ben. With a staff of 600, parking for 168 cars, nine elevators, and three helipads, it makes the needle-like glass towers of Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row seem like overcrowded slum tenements.
Now, Mukesh’s son Anant, a young man with the cuddly good looks of Barry White and Elton John’s eye for elaborate diamond brooches, is marrying his childhood sweetheart. As befits the richest man in India—and, according to Bloomberg.com, the 11th richest worldwide— Mukesh threw a party that cost a reported $150 million, a three-day bonfire of cash at which Rihanna sang and Bollywood stars danced. There have been big, fat, crazy, rich Indian weddings before, but this was not a wedding; that will be in July. This was a pre-wedding party. Think of it as a sort of elaborate save-the-date.
At one point during the 72-hour social marathon, Priscilla Chan (Mrs. Mark Zuckerberg) pounced on the groom-to-be’s wrist with the words “This watch is fantastic.” “I know—I told him already,” interjected her husband (the world’s fourth-richest man, according to Bloomberg.com) before making the now famous “I never really wanted to get a watch, but …” remark that signals his Damascene conversion to watch-lover.
It is fitting that the piece that turned the Facebook founder on to horology was a Richard Mille. An RMS 10 Tourbillon Koi, with three of the eponymous fishes swimming around the movement, it is a piece destined to be known as “that” watch, or maybe simply the “Ambani.” But before you get too excited about this being a horological symbol of India’s mercantile plutocracy, it is not even a new watch. Anant had already been photographed wearing it back in 2020, and the $1.25 million or so that it cost places it in the mid-range, rather than the out-of-range, of Mille pricing.
It makes the needle-like glass towers of Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row seem like overcrowded slum tenements.
It is 25 years since I first met Richard Mille. Sadly, it was not at an Ambani party but in a space little bigger than a passport-photo booth on the first floor of the Basel watch fair. Back then Mille was not a brand but a man who had left the Parisian jeweler Mauboussin to launch watches of mechanical interest with a radical aesthetic using what were then considered highly unusual materials, including titanium and carbon.
The curved, tonneau-shaped case, the bezel punctuated by proprietary titanium screws, the twin retrograde indicators, and a tourbillon that looked like a miniature satellite combined to make a watch the like of which I had never seen before. With a complicated movement housed in a strongbox-like case of avant-garde design, it was little short of a new way of making watches. Even I could see that Mille was going to be important, but no one, including Richard himself, could have imagined just how important.
B.R.M. (Before Richard Mille) collectible watches tended to be either rugged “tool” watches (such as the Rolex Submariner) or hallowed high complications that needed to be handled with care (the Patek Philippe Minute Repeater). The RM 001, as the watch that I saw became known, was both, as Richard showed me a couple of years later when he took it off and threw it across the basement bar of George in Mayfair, then picked it up and restored it to his wrist without any apparent ill effect.
Impact resistance is a Mille preoccupation that has resulted in some remarkable watches designed to cope with the shocks that occur when sports implements connect with spherical objects. Most famous is the tourbillon wristwatch, weighing a scarcely believable 0.7 ounces, that Rafael Nadal was able to wear while playing: light enough not to impede his game and strong enough to resist hour after hour of 130-m.p.h. serves.
He took it off and threw it across the basement bar of George in Mayfair, then picked it up and restored it to his wrist without any apparent ill effect.
The world of Mille is a place of extremes that has produced, among many other things, the world’s thinnest (0.07 inches) mechanical watch, made to celebrate the brand’s association with Ferrari. Looking a little like a titanium credit card, it eschewed the convention of superposed components in favor of a planar distribution of wheels and pinions, which enabled Mille—and he is very proud of this—to use a proper baseplate rather than resort to the space-saving technique of using the inner surface of the caseback, a method employed by the pretenders to thinnest-watch status.
But, to an extent, such feats of technical wizardry have tended to be overshadowed by the high-profile design (it’s impossible to mistake a Mille for anything else), high-profile clientele, and high pricing. I have heard, anecdotally, of upscale car showrooms that require new sales associates to learn the past decade of Richard Mille catalogues so as to be able to assess the spending power of clients at a glance. And so prevalent are fakes that Richard Mille holds master classes for professional soccer players so that they can identify an authentic RM and avoid falling prey to counterfeiters. Even the “entry level” Mille, the RM 67-01, which happens to be my favorite, costs $142,000.
But the point is that Mille does not make watches for me—or, I suspect, you. It makes them for billionaires, which brings us back to Ambani. His RMS 10 Tourbillon Koi is part of a small series of timepieces, each different from the other, so he is never going to have to suffer the indignity of walking into a room and finding someone wearing the same watch.
What’s more, this is not the only Richard Mille watch that Ambani owns. I understand that he is also partial to Mille’s Sapphire watches—totally transparent timepieces (recommended retail price: circa $2.2 million, perhaps twice that on the secondary market) in which the movement seems to hover. Such feats of horological legerdemain divert the mind from pondering the futility of human existence.
Importantly, Ambani also has the security to enable him to put on whatever watch he likes without having to worry about being mugged—car salesmen are not the only people who have memorized the Mille oeuvre.
So, the takeaways from the Ambani-Zuckerberg-Mille encounter are: The rich really are different; they wear different watches. And if you are going to the Ambani nuptials in July, you now know what to get the groom as a wedding present.
Nicholas Foulkes, the author of more than 20 books on the arts and history, is a London-based writer and editor