First, know who you are actually inviting

Every event says it is for “family offices.” But a family office is not one audience. It is three.

1. Principals: the family members who own the wealth, including the next generation.
2. Trusted advisors: many families have that one person who has been with the family for 20+ years and is viewed as part of the family. They may hold an employee title, but they sit in a different category altogether.
3. Employees: the CIO, CFO, analysts, the legal, tax and accounts specialists, and the operations and back office teams who run the machine day to day.

Each of these is a legitimate audience, and excellent events have been built for each. But they respond to completely different invitations. Once you decide who you are targeting, everything else follows, starting with who you invite. If your goal is to get members of the family in the room, the actual principals and next-generation members rather than their CIOs and analysts, the single biggest factor is not the agenda. It is not the speaker lineup. It is not even who else is attending, though that runs a close second.

It is location, location, location.

The airport hotel test

Here is the simplest version of the rule. In Bombay, if your event is at an airport hotel, the family is not coming. It does not matter how strong the content is. The invitation gets a polite response, and on the day, the principal sends someone from the team, or no one at all.

At first we assumed this was about convenience, and it partly is. For a family based in South Bombay or Worli, a trip to the airport belt and back can consume half a working day. Principals guard their time ferociously, and the mental math on an invitation happens in about five seconds.

But convenience is only half the story. The venue is a signal. When a principal reads an invite, they are scanning three things: who is hosting, who else will be there, and where it is. The address answers the third question instantly and quietly colors the other two. The right venue says this room will be worth my time. An offbeat venue says this one is for my team.

There is also familiarity and discretion. These are rooms the families already know. Their drivers know the location and the hotel staff know them. The private dining rooms have hosted a hundred conversations that never left the room. That comfort matters far more than most organizers realize.

The Bombay map

In Bombay, the list of venues that reliably draw principals is remarkably short: the Oberoi or Trident at Nariman Point, the Taj Mahal Palace in Colaba, the Four Seasons in Worli, and the St. Regis in Lower Parel. If you genuinely need a large-format space, the Jio World Convention Centre in BKC works. That is essentially the entire map. Notice the geography: Nariman Point and Colaba for old South Bombay, Worli and Lower Parel for the mid-town corridor, and BKC only when scale demands it. Everything else is a compromise, and your RSVP list will say so before you do.

We saw this firsthand in August, when we hosted our first event of our own: a private, off-the-record roundtable lunch for next-generation family members, held at the Four Seasons in Worli. No stage, no slides, no pitch. The venue had done half the work before a single word was spoken, and the people we hoped would be in the room were in the room.

It is not about luxury

To be clear, this is not about marble lobbies and chandeliers. The venue is part of the invitation itself. It tells the principal what kind of room this will be before a single speaker is announced. A brilliant agenda at the wrong address gets you delegates. The same agenda at the right address gets you decision-makers.

Everything else matters, second

Curation still matters. Format matters. Keeping sales pitches off the stage matters enormously. Those things decide whether people come back next year. But location decides whether they come at all.

None of this is criticism of the people organizing and building these events. The programming we have seen over these 18 months has been genuinely strong, and the Indian family office community is better for it. Consider it the one unlock that programming alone cannot deliver. So before finalizing the agenda or the speaker list, ask the question the family will ask first: where is it. Get that answer right, and everything you have built gets the room it deserves.

30 years ago today – July 30, 1996, we bought that domain name.

Honestly, we had no idea what it would become. No grand plan, no market research. Just two guys, a brand new internet, and a name that felt obvious. We went live on October 1, 1996. And the response was beyond our wildest expectations.

For those who want the beginning of the story: the spark was the Netscape IPO on August 9, 1995. Sandeep and I kicked around the two ideas we felt the internet would transform, jobs and matrimonials, and we picked matrimonials. In July 1996 I bought shaadi.com from Network Solutions, the only place you could buy a domain back then, and built version 1 as a static site in Microsoft FrontPage. The full story is in my 2015 post: Origin Story: shaadi.com.

Ahead of this anniversary, I opened up a backup I had of the original member database. The high-level stats are in the image below, our time capsule rendered the way the web looked in 1996. The original deck we used to sell $99 banner ads is right here, Comic Sans and all: Advertising on shaadi.com, 1996 (PDF).

But one number stopped me: 3,982 members signed up with a Hotmail address. That is 35% of the entire database. Sabeer Bhatia had launched Hotmail on July 4, 1996. It was all of 89 days old when we went live, and it ended up carrying more than a third of our members. Somewhere out there are couples who found each other through two things that did not exist at the start of 1996.

I sold the site in 2000. People always ask why. There is a line in the movie Blow where George Jung’s cellmate tells him: “…you had the wrong dream.”

Everything after was timing, luck, and people far braver than us.

For a while now, the conventional wisdom has been that car shows are dying. Detroit collapsed. Frankfurt is a shadow of what it used to be. Geneva got cancelled multiple times. The narrative was that nobody cares about car shows anymore, that everyone reveals new cars on YouTube, and that the whole format is finished.

That narrative is wrong. Or to be more precise, it is wrong about Asia.

Beijing by the numbers

Auto China 2026 was not a car show. It was a statement.

• 380,000 square metres of exhibition space across two venues. Roughly the size of 50 football pitches. That is roughly 4 million square feet…WTF.
• 1,451 vehicles on display.
• 181 world premieres.
• Over 80% of the cars shown were new energy vehicles.

It is now officially the largest auto show on the planet, and it is not even close. Here is the part that really hits you. In a single hall at the show, there were more EV models than the entire United States offers across its market. There are seventeen halls.

So how many EV brands does China actually have?

Estimates put it at roughly 500 carmakers that have entered the EV space at some point. The market is now consolidating, but even after the shakeout, the field still dwarfs anything in the West.

A partial list of names you should probably start learning:

• BYD
• Geely
• Xpeng
• Nio
• Li Auto
• Zeekr
• Xiaomi
• Huawei
• Chery
• GAC

And the list keeps going.

A few things from the show that genuinely surprised me

• BYD demonstrated charging from 10% to 97% in nine minutes. Tesla still has not matched this.
• Xpeng unveiled the GX flagship SUV with 750 km range and Level 4 autonomous-ready hardware for $58,000. That is about Rs. 50 lakhs. Try finding anything close to that in the Indian or American market.
• Xiaomi, the phone company, now has a humanoid robot working in its EV factory and brought a Vision GT supercar concept to Beijing. The lines between phone, car, and robot are blurring fast.

Why China is dominating EVs

Three reasons in my mind.

1. Vertical integration. BYD makes its own batteries, its own chips, and its own software. Most Chinese EV makers control their stack end to end. That keeps costs low and product cycles short.
2. Batteries. China owns the global battery supply chain. CATL and BYD alone account for the majority of EV batteries shipped worldwide. When you control the most expensive component in the car, you control the economics of the whole industry.
3. Sheer competitive intensity. With 500 brands fighting for survival, the pace of innovation is brutal. The ones still standing are forced to ship better cars faster than anyone else on earth.

We have seen this movie before

Here is the part most people in the West are missing. We have lived through this exact pattern twice already.

• In the 1970s, Japanese cars were dismissed as cheap, tinny, throwaway boxes. American executives laughed at Toyota and Honda. Then Toyota quietly went on to become the most valuable automaker in the world, and Lexus rewrote the definition of luxury and reliability.
• In the 1990s, Korean cars were the punchline. Hyundai was a joke. People bought a Hyundai because they could not afford anything else. Today the Hyundai Ioniq 5 wins international Car of the Year awards, and Kia is one of the most respected design houses on the planet.
• Even Elon Musk fell for this trap. In a 2011 Bloomberg interview, when asked if BYD could ever compete with Tesla, he laughed out loud on camera. He literally asked the reporter, “have you seen their car?” and dismissed the technology as not very strong.
• Fast forward to January 2024. Same Elon, on a Tesla earnings call, telling investors that Chinese EV makers will “pretty much demolish” most other car companies in the world without trade barriers.

That is the arc. Every single time. Dismiss, underestimate, then watch them eat your lunch.

The comfortable narrative is running out

The West still likes to tell itself that Chinese EVs are cheap and unsophisticated. That comfort is running out fast. The cars are no longer cheap. They are no longer unsophisticated. And the next decade of automotive history is going to be written in Mandarin.

I had the pre-lunch slot (objectively the worst, everyone is focused on food), so I opened with the famous xkcd cartoon. You know the one. A giant, teetering tower of modern digital infrastructure, all balanced on one tiny, random piece at the bottom…in this case geopolitics.

I retitled it for family offices. The tower? Generational plans. IPS, returns, tax, risk, security, legacy, longevity, governance, succession. All stacked precariously on top of each other. The tiny piece at the bottom holding it all up? I labelled it The Strait of Hormuz. Because that’s how it goes. You spend years building the perfect plan, and then geopolitics decides to have an opinion.

The point wasn’t to scare anyone. It was that family offices today are operating in conditions that didn’t exist even ten years ago.

Think about it. The previous generation of Indian wealth was tracked across what I call EFGHI: Equities, Fixed deposits, Gold, Housing, Insurance. Five buckets. You could keep most of it in your head, or worst case, in a notebook your CA had a copy of.

Now? AIFs, SIFs, PMS, REITs, InVITs, SGBs, G-Secs, ULIPs, crypto, startups, private equity, traded bonds, derivatives, ETFs, US stocks. Spread across multiple entities. Multiple managers. Multiple advisors. Multiple generations. Often multiple geographies.

So how does a modern family office actually operate in all this mess? My pitch was a simple framework. Three As.

Aggregation. You can’t make decisions on data you can’t see. Pulling everything into one place sounds boring, but it’s the foundational layer everything else sits on.

Access anywhere, anytime. A consolidated view that lives only on the patriarch’s laptop in his Walkeshwar flat is not a modern family office. The principal needs it, the spouse needs it, the next-gen needs it, the CIO needs it. From anywhere.

Analysis. Once the data is clean and accessible, you can finally ask the questions that actually matter. XIRR vs benchmark. Concentration risk. Cash flow visibility for the next 18 months. Holding period on that PMS slice. The good stuff.

I closed with a teaser on where this is heading next, which we’re calling Enhanced Analytics. Conversational AI sitting on top of clean family office data. More on that soon.

If any of this hits home, ping me at manish@mprofit.in.

I was at an event, sitting in a room full of interesting people, and at the end of the day I told the founder something simple. I said, you have built a great tribe of people here. I meant it. The room had a certain energy. Everyone was curious, generous, a little bit irreverent, and genuinely interested in each other. Nobody was performing. People were just being themselves, and that is rarer than it sounds. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all of us, whether we admit it or not, are quietly on the same hunt. We are looking for our tribe.

Your tribe is the group where you do not have to explain yourself. You show up, you exhale, and you are home. You can laugh at the same jokes. You can argue about the same things. You can learn from each other without anyone keeping score. It is the group where the conversation picks up exactly where it left off, even if the last time you met was six months ago.

People find their tribe in different places. Some people find it in religion and spirituality. Some find it in car groups, where the love of a certain engine note or a certain badge is enough of a shared language. Some find it through YPO or EO, where the shared weight of running a business becomes the glue. Some find it in fitness groups, founder circles, book clubs, poker tables, or a random WhatsApp group that somehow became the best part of their week. The container does not really matter. What matters is that the people inside it think in a way that makes sense to you.

Here is the part most people miss. You cannot manufacture a tribe. You can join rooms, attend events, and pay for memberships, but the tribe itself only shows up when you stop trying so hard. It reveals itself slowly, through repeated small moments. A conversation that goes deeper than expected. A text message that makes you laugh on a bad day. A casual invitation that ends up changing your perspective. That is the stuff.

And the tribe you need at 25 is not the tribe you need at 45. Life changes. Priorities shift. The people who were central at one stage become distant at another, and that is okay. Tribes are living things. You keep growing, you keep meeting, and you keep being open to the possibility that your next tribe is one conversation away.

What I saw last week was a good reminder of that. When you find your people, you feel it immediately. And when you do, hold on to them.

AI is doing it again. And this time, I am watching it happen in two industries at once.

What I Saw on the Tech Side

Two and a half years ago, when GitHub Copilot (the coding assistant) started getting traction, the reaction from most software developers was predictable. “It hallucinates.” “It can’t handle complex logic.” “It’s a toy.” I heard this from senior engineers, CTOs, architects. Smart people who genuinely believed AI was not ready for serious development work.

Today, those same people are using Claude or Cursor for the majority of their coding. The conversation has flipped completely. We are now talking about whether junior developer roles will exist in five years.

That arc, from dismissal to disruption, took less than 30 months.

Aditya Agarwal posted this on X last month and it got 3.3 million impressions.

If you don’t know Aditya Agarwal, he describes himself as:

“I was one of the first engineers at Facebook, where I built the original search engine. I went on to become chief technology officer of Dropbox, where I scaled the engineering team from 25 people to a thousand.”

The best quote from that Tweet was:

“I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn’t make any sense to do so. Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy…but disoriented.”

When someone like Aditya says that, you listen.

Now Watch What’s Happening in Wealth Management

I spend a lot of my time talking to the owners and principals of family offices and wealth advisory firms across India. These are sophisticated people, they manage billions of dollars. They have seen markets, cycles, and plenty of tech promises come and go.

When I bring up AI, the response is almost identical to what I heard from developers in 2022.

“It’s not accurate enough.” “It can’t understand the nuances of Indian taxation.” “Our clients want a human, not a chatbot.” “It made an error when I tested it on a complex portfolio query.”

I get it. These are fair concerns. And they are also, I believe, exactly the wrong conclusion to draw.

What the Next 18 to 24 Months Look Like

I am not predicting that relationship managers disappear. What I am predicting is that the nature of the job transforms completely, just like software development has.

The family office that used to need three analysts to consolidate a multi-asset portfolio report will need one, with AI doing the heavy lifting. The RM who used to spend two days preparing for a client review will do it in two hours.

The firms that start building these workflows now will be way ahead. The ones waiting for AI to be “ready” will find themselves in the same position as the companies that waited for mobile or cloud to mature. Playing catch-up in a market that has already moved on.

A Final Thought

I was essentially born and brought up in the US and moved to India in October 2005. I have spent the last two decades watching India’s wealth management industry grow from a cottage business into a genuinely sophisticated ecosystem. Some of the family offices I work with today are world-class in their thinking. They deserve world-class tools.

AI is not the threat to this industry. The real threat is assuming you have more time than you do.

The software developers thought that too.

UPDATE: Last week, Aditya shared a longer article on X about AI and coding, which you can find here:

A couple of weeks ago, Anthropic released their Wealth Management plugin for Claude Cowork. As someone who has spent 17 years building MProfit, a wealth tracking and analytics platform for family offices and advisors, I obviously had to dig in. I put together a 12-part thread walking through the plugin, what it does, how to use it, what the inputs and outputs look like, and I shared all the PDFs involved. I expected a few hundred likes from the usual fintech crowd. Instead, it blew up. 2.2 million views. 11,000 reposts. 23,000 likes.

My phone didn’t stop buzzing for two days.

I think the reason it resonated is because the thread wasn’t hype. It was a practitioner’s take. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know what a portfolio review actually involves. The time it takes. The nuance. The back and forth between an analyst and an advisor before anything gets presented to a client. So when I showed what Claude’s plugin could do with a sample MProfit report, people paid attention. Not because AI is new or shiny, but because the output was genuinely useful. And fast. Uncomfortably fast.

This wasn’t the first time I tested LLMs on wealth management workflows. Back in February, I had already run a head-to-head comparison between ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude using MProfit’s Advanced Performance Review report. I uploaded the same PDF to all three and asked each one to review it from the lens of a wealth manager preparing a report for a family office principal. ChatGPT was fast but bare bones. Gemini looked polished. Claude made me sit up from my chair. The PowerPoint it generated through the Cowork plugin would have taken an analyst days to create. I wrote about all of this on the blog.

But the Wealth Management plugin thread took it further. It wasn’t just about what an LLM can do with a single file anymore. It was about what happens when you give it specialized tooling, connectors to real data sources, and workflows designed for how wealth managers actually work. That’s what the plugin does. Portfolio analysis, drift detection, tax exposure, rebalancing recommendations at scale. Anthropic even partnered with firms like LPL Financial to develop this stuff.

Now, before anyone thinks I’m saying go upload your client data to Claude tomorrow, let me be clear: I’m not. Most of the family offices I work with are very cautious about putting anything into an LLM. And they should be. Data privacy is a real concern, and the question of whether these models use your data for training is one every firm needs to answer for themselves before jumping in.

What I am saying is that the direction is clear. What used to take an analyst one to ten days can now happen in minutes. The quality isn’t perfect, but it’s getting better at a pace that should make anyone in financial services sit up and think about what their job looks like in two years. The thread went viral because people felt that in their gut.

The funny thing is, I’ve been tweeting about cars for years. Ferraris in Mumbai, Bugattis at auctions, barn finds in Rajasthan. Hundreds of car posts. And the one that takes off is about a wealth management AI plugin. I can’t even be mad about it. It’s the intersection of everything I’ve been doing for the last two decades: finance, technology, and trying to figure out where this industry is headed next.

If you haven’t seen the thread, go check it out. And if you’re in the wealth management space and still on the sidelines when it comes to AI, I’d say the sidelines are getting smaller by the day.

You can review the output from the Claude plugin below:
The Wealth Management Client Review doc
The Rs. 20 Cr. investment proposal
The PowerPoint preso for the principles of the family

The History of Concours d’Elegance

Concours d’Elegance, which is French for “competition of elegance,” originated in 17th-century France as a parade of aristocratic horse-drawn carriages through the parks of Paris. The concept evolved over centuries, but it really took off when the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance launched in 1950 in Pebble Beach, California with only 30 cars. Today, it’s widely considered the most prestigious car show in the world, held every August on the 18th fairway of the Pebble Beach Golf Links overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

So what exactly gets judged at a Concours d’Elegance? Cars that have been restored to “mint” factory condition are evaluated on three key factors:

• Authenticity & Originality: Vehicles are assessed on mechanical originality, coachwork accuracy, documented provenance, and overall presentation.
• Significance & Rarity: The history of the vehicle matters as much as the restoration. Who owned it? Is it one of five ever made?
• Impact on Value: Winning a top prize at a major Concours can significantly raise a vehicle’s profile and market value among collectors. It’s like getting a Michelin star for your car.

The 2024 Oberoi Concours d’Elegance

The Oberoi Concours d’Elegance — which I’m going to shorten to OCD – is actually a fitting acronym since every vehicle owner at this show definitely had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder about their vehicle…and it showed!

The OCD held its first event in February 2024 to celebrate the Oberoi Group’s 90th anniversary. The event was curated by Manvendra Singh Barwani, one of India’s most respected automotive historians. Manvendra founded India’s first vintage and classic car restoration workshop back in 1978, co-authored the book The Automobiles of the Maharajas, and has been a judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance since 2012. So yeah, the man knows his cars.

The Oberoi Group pulled out all the stops for that inaugural event and invited Sandra Button to be the Chief Judge. Sandra has been the Chairman of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance – the gold standard of Concours events globally. Having her involved immediately gave the OCD serious international street cred.

The 2026 Oberoi Concours d’Elegance

The 2nd edition of the OCD was held from February 20–22, 2026, and had round 120 vintage and classic cars and motorcycles were on display.

The 2026 edition also included a new category called the Youngtimer Classics (covering cars from 1975–1990), which is a smart move to be more inclusive for the younger generation of car enthusiasts. This is actually a trend across Concours events worldwide, and I think it’s a great one. You need to get the next generation hooked early.

FUN FACT – Between 1908 and 1947, some 900 Rolls-Royces were shipped to India from the factories in Derby and Crewe. With around 230 maharajas during that period, that averages out to roughly four Rolls-Royces per prince. India’s automotive heritage runs deep.

Siddhraj Singh, who is the son of Manvendra Singh Barwani and the Event Director of the OCD, was brilliant on the ground. I got to meet him during a curated walk along the lawns of the Udaivilas, where he walked us through some of the vehicles and their backstories. And that’s really what makes an event like this so special – it’s not just about seeing beautiful cars, it’s about hearing the provenance and the stories behind them.

When the judging was taking place, I would follow the judges so I could eavesdrop on the owners sharing their stories. That is what the Concours d’Elegance is all about. It’s not a car show, it’s a history lesson on wheels.

SFOs and SFOs

Here’s something that connects my two worlds. In my domain of finance when people talk about SFOs, they usually mean single-family offices. But in the rarified world of vintage cars, SFO means single-family owned – a vehicle that has been handed down from one generation to another within the same family. That kind of unbroken ownership is a massive deal in the collector car world. It’s like a blue-chip stock that’s been held for 80 years – the story only gets better with time.

Wrapping It Up

If I have to summarize the 2nd OCD, it comes down to four things:

• If this is what car heaven looks like, sign me up. The lawns of the Udaivilas with Lake Pichola shimmering in the background, lined with the most beautiful machines ever built – it was surreal.
• I was jealous of the people around me – not because of their vehicles, but because of their automotive knowledge. The depth of expertise at this event was humbling and enlightening. I learned more about cars in two days than I have in years.
• It was great to meet many people who know me as “mrjain” from Instagram. LOL.
• I feel like EVERY other automotive event I attend will never be able to hold a candle to this one. The bar has been set impossibly high.

Lastly, I have to thank Arjun Oberoi for envisioning and hosting such an incredible event at what is one of my favorite hotels in India – the Oberoi Udaivilas. The Oberoi hospitality was everywhere, and everyone from the staff to the fellow attendees were gracious and helpful. The fact that this event has only had two editions and is already being talked about in the same breath as established global Concours events says everything about the vision behind it. Can’t wait to attend the 3rd edition in 2028!

Then I saw it in action and thought, HOLY SHIT, this is big. Within days, I read Matt Shumer’s X article titled “Something Big is Happening” and it all made sense and it was also very unnerving.

Let me explain.

The Portfolio Review

One of the most popular use cases I have seen for these AI tools to create a portfolio review. Typically this is used by wealth managers for their new clients to show how they can re-engineering their portfolio to maximize gains. Sometimes it can take anywhere from 1 to 10 days to generate a meaning full report. With these AI tools it takes under a minute and the results are quite impressive.

I decided to take some sample/demo data from MProfit, the wealth tracking and analytics platform for family offices and upload it to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Below is a screenshot of what the sample/demo file looks like – it’s called the Advanced Performance Review report and it contains a lot of data that is very useful, if you know what you are looking for.

In summary the prompt I used for the LLMs (Large Language Models) was to review the file from the lens of a wealth manager and give a report meant for the principles/promoters of the family office. The exact prompt I used was:

OpenAI ChatGPT (GPT 5.2)

First up was ChatGPT, I uploaded a single PDF file and had to wait no more then 30 seconds for the output. Yes, only 30 seconds! Any normal human being would have taken 60-90 minutes to review the portfolio and then taken time to create a report on it. The recommendations were pretty good but the report and presentation were very bare bones. You can download the files that were created and judge for yourself -> PDF PPT

Google Gemini (Gemini 3)

I then proceeded to upload the same file to Google Gemini. The recommendations were again very good and the presentation of the document was also quite nice that you could actually hand to a client. Download the PDF of the output -> PDF

Anthropic Claude (Opus 4.6)

Now we get to the LLM that really made me sit up from my chair and take notice. I had someone on my team use Claude Max and take the same PDF file and upload it into the Claude plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint. In no time, it created a great presentation that would have taken an analyst days to create. Again the recommendations were great and the presentation in PowerPoint was unreal. I took it a step further and also had it create an HTML file again with recommendations and what to do with the portfolio. Both outputs were mind-bending knowing that it only took minutes to create. Download the output -> PDF/PPT

Summary

One of the issues in uploading financial data to an LLM is that they may use it to train the models, so I’m not advocating you do that. Most of the family offices I have dealt with are absolutely against using LLMs. While it is unnerving to see an LLM perform in minutes what usually takes an analyst days to create, I’m only showing what is possible and where the financial services industry is headed and the repercussions are going to be big. For the industry, the ‘Something Big’ happening right now is a mandate to evolve.

What happened? One of the largest Ferrari collections called the Phil Bachman Collection was put on the auction block and smashed many records. However, the headline stealer was a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. The 250 GTO is the holy grail of car collecting. While one famously sold for $70 million in a private sale, this particular example, from the Jon Shirley collection, crossed the block for $38.5 million.

Here is the kicker: it didn’t even have its original engine.

In the world of concours-level collecting, “matching numbers” is usually everything. Yet, because this was the only factory-delivered GTO in Bianco (white) and carried a racing pedigree that included legends like Graham Hill, the market looked past the non-original V12. For an ultra-wealthy investor, $38.5 million for a non-original GTO actually looks like a “bargain” with significant upside. David Lee, a prominent Ferrari collector from Southern California, is the man behind this crazy purchase.

The Bachman “Yellow” Wave

If the GTO was the solo star, the Phil Bachman Collection was the ensemble performance of the decade. Phil was a legend who loved his Ferraris in Giallo Modena (yellow). His collection of 46 cars went up with no reserve, and the results were a bloodbath for previous price records.

In just two hours, the “Big Five” Ferrari halo models didn’t just sell; they reset the market:

• 288 GTO: $8.525M (nearly double the previous record)
• F40: $6.6M
• F50: $12.21M
• Enzo: $17.875M (a mind-blowing 4x the previous record)
• LaFerrari: $6.71M

The Enzo price, in particular, was a “head-scratcher” for many, but it signals a massive shift. The Ultra-High Networth Individual (UHNI) crowd is moving their focus toward “newer” exotics from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

Why This Matters for the Ultra-Wealthy

Why are people dropping $17 million on a car that was $650,000 new? It’s simple: scarcity, tangibility, and of course flex factor. In an era of digital assets and volatile markets, a Ferrari halo car is a finite physical asset that you can actually enjoy. For a Family Office, these cars act as a hedge. They are globally mobile, hold their value across currencies, and can potentially generate returns that outperform almost any traditional asset class.

The “never say never” mindset I’ve adopted in India applies here too. I used to think these auction prices were a bubble. But seeing the sheer depth of bidding, it’s clear that for the world’s wealthiest, the garage is becoming the new vault.

Whether it’s a white GTO or a sea of yellow (sorry Giallo Modena) Ferraris, one thing is certain: the intersection of passion and profit has never looked better.