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A high-profile car auction broke out in the strangest way on Saturday.
A 1939 "Type 64" Porsche, the only one of its kind, is expected to be sold for about $ 20 million at RM Sotheby's auction
OFFER, + 0.15%
in Monterey, California on Saturday night.
Adjudicators have heard that the auction started at $ 30 million and then at $ 40 million. While the crowd, now boiling, gasping and clapping, the price quickly reached $ 70 million, a record price for any car auction.
But wait.
The auctioneer ended the auction when he found that the price displayed on the screen was incorrect.
"It's written 70 people, it's 17," said the auctioneer, Maarten ten Holder, in a YouTube video. "It may be my pronunciation, we are at $ 17 million."
Apparently, the screen operator had misunderstood the auctioneer's accented Dutch English and entered 30 for 13, 40 for 14, and so on.
The crowd was not amused and many of them went out, accusing Sotheby's of having jokes.
No other bid higher than $ 17 million – which was lower than the minimum bid price of the car – was therefore removed from the auction.
"What a joke," said Bloomberg News, a Southern California collector who attended the auction, Johnny Shaughnessy. "They just lost so much credibility."
It's Sotheby's second black eye for a year. Last October, a Banksy painting was shredded at an auction in London shortly after being sold for over a million pounds, apparently as a prank of the "joke". mysterious artist. At the time, Sotheby's denied being tricked.
Sotheby's apologized Sunday and denied any shenanigans. "It was by no means a joke or a joke on the part of anyone at RM Sotheby's, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding amplified by the excitement in the room," the company said in a statement, according to Jalopnik.
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