The minds of certain pockets of the collectible world exploded earlier this year when a rare Pokémon card sold for record $16.5 million. Heads spun when it was revealed that the buyer was AJ Scaramucci, the founder of venture capital firm Solari Capital and the son of investor and former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci.
That sale was just the opening salvo for Scaramucci, who has since founded Treasure Trove, a collectible venture dedicated to what he calls “alternative assets.”
This summer, the investor found himself making another record-setting deal when his company paid $2 million for a copy of Tales of Suspense No. 39, the Marvel Comics title that first introduced Iron Man, The Hollywood Reporter can exclusively report. The 1963 comic, which is the only known copy to be given the mint or near mint grade of 9.8 by the grading company Certify Guarantee Company, now joins a copy of Amazing Fantasy No. 15 (the first appearance of Spider-Man) and Fantastic Four No. 1 as the only comics from the Silver Age to hit that threshold.
Scaramucci is new to the collecting field, picking up the hobby during the Covid era. In an arena that is about nerd passion, he brings a calculating unemotional eye to the cultural value of material based on intellectual property. “I see collectibles in the same way I see my gold and Bitcoin investing,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
To many in the collecting community, Scaramucci and the type of collector he represents are anathema to the hobby. They call him a speculator who artificially drives up prices and who is creating a Tulip Fever for cards and comics.
When asked to respond to those charges, he points to sales of Monets and Dalis in the dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars. “A comic book or a Pikachu card, I view these things as fine art. They’re just an up and coming asset classes. So I think a world where comic books could indeed sell for $50 to $100 million, I don’t think that should surprise anybody when it happens. I think it really is inevitable.”
The calculating treasure hunter has surrounded himself with an advisory board that includes the founders of two major collectibles auction houses, Ken Goldin of Goldin, and Jim Halperin and Steve Ivy, the co-founders of Heritage Auctions. Toy executive and collector Jermy Padawar is also on the board. The goal is to bring credibility to Treasure Trove but also help in sourcing grail-level pieces, since the auction firms have access to collectors. And he has a media strategy that includes making videos documenting the search and acquisitions of the items, and the characters behind them.
“Collectibles have evolved from passion assets to a serious global asset class, and Treasure Trove is building for what comes next,” Padawar tells to THR.
In an exclusive chat, Scaramucci talks about how the Pokemon card will one day be worth $100 million, how he’s not a 800-pound gorilla at auctions (but wants to be) and how the Declaration of Independence is on his hit list.
Earlier this year you paid $16.5 million for a Pokémon card. Why?
Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise of all time. It’s done $288 billion of lifetime sales in 30 years. So it’s outpaced Star Wars, Marvel, and Harry Potter combined. There’s been about 85 billion Pokémon cards printed over those 30 years. And if you add up the value of the slabbed, graded, and authenticated cards by PSA, CGC and Beckett, you will get a number that is approaching $30 billion. So that is the asset class value that is Pokémon cards. So, a mere $16.5 million for the number one collectible in the highest grossing franchise of all time, in my view, was an absolute no-brainer. And we at the Treasure Trove have a very high conviction that the Pikachu Illustrator card, as a PSA 10, as a one of one asset, will inevitably be $100 million card.
And now you’ve just bought the first appearance of Iron Man for $2 million. I ask you again, why?
As a collector, I do have a genuine passion for all the things that we acquire. But I also view them as investments in scale cultural assets. I grew up in an era of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was in high school in 2008 when Tony Stark made his appearance on the big screen. Robert Downey Jr. is indeed my spirit animal. The guy’s an absolute stud. And, you know, the reason we acquired this piece is that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has turned into the highest grossing film franchise of all time, going on nearly $35 billion of total sales at the box office. I imagine that as this Dr. Doom cycle continues over the next four or five years, it will certainly eclipse over $40 billion.
And Iron Man has done more revenue at the box office by a significant margin relative to Superman, which currently has the top spot in terms of a comic book sale at $15 million for Action Comics one in the CGC 9.0. So at $2 million, we saw this as the unbelievably undervalued and under-appreciated collectible asset, and we’re very proud to own it.
This comic sold for $840,000 two years ago. That’s a big jump in two years. Who did you buy that from? Because they made out like bandits.
It was a private transaction. We acquired it from a really passionate collector who has held it in his collection since the previous acquisition. It’s very rare for a Silver Age comic from the ’60s to be a 9.8 grade. If you go to the population report, you’ll find that there’s been about 3,000 of these that have been discovered and graded with CGC over the years. Just one is in an unrestored 9.8 condition.
Do you believe that this comic is actually worth $2 million?
I think this comic is worth significantly more.
Is your goal to flip this comic in a year or two for like $3 million or whatever number you have in your head?
I’ve actually already received offers to buy the comic in excess of that number. We have no interest in selling the comic. I mean, our view at the Treasure Trove is we’re building what we call the cultural store value. So, in the same way gold is the physical store value, where Bitcoin is the digital store value, we are building the cultural store value. Our optimization function is really like a Berkshire Hathaway model where we’re looking to identify assets that have a real staying power over decades and perhaps generations. This asset, among the many that we have purchased fits that heuristic. We have no interest in selling the comic anytime soon.
Was the deal you made an all cash transaction? Did you write a check or was there a combination of trades of collectibles that add up to $2 million? Because there’s a meaningful difference between someone actually paying $2 million and someone going, “I have five other comics here and let’s just trade.”
It was an all-cash transaction, so it was $2 million wired to the private collector. There are opportunities for sure to do trades or combinations. And we’ve done things like that in the past. This was not one of those.
How do you identify which collectibles to go after?
When you’re investing in collectibles, it is a bit of an art, but also a bit of a science. So in the same way that I’ll underwrite a security or invest in a private company, at Solari Capital, we apply those same heuristics to collectibles. So for the Iron Man comic…you’ve got an operating company, Disney,dss that is investing every single year to continue to propagate and nurture these characters in this intellectual property. And what that does is it creates a lot of collectibles in its wake.
And where is Treasure Trove come in all this?
You’ll see us in the market, actively underwriting, doing due diligence. We like to joke and say that we’re treasure hunters, hence the name of the company. We’re navigating through the multi-trillion dollar asset class that is collectibles, and we’re looking to acquire grail assets, true one-of-one assets that have a history of compounding faster than market rates of return.
So you’re basically going to be like the 800-pound gorilla that can come into any auction and snap something up.
There are a lot of 800-pound gorillas out here in capital markets. There’s people like Jeff Bezos and Ken Griffin and many others that show up at auctions. These individuals are really institutions, and they’ve got tens, or in some rare cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. While we’re not quite there yet, that is indeed the aspiration.
And where are all these so-called assets being housed?
A lot of collectors will acquire things and they will store them in vaults in Switzerland or in Delaware. And some of them are just in homes, and they’re never really seen again. What we’re looking to do at the Treasure Trove is partner with museums around the country, and then eventually around the world, to build exhibits and installations just so people can see and enjoy these things.
What else is on the on the list that you guys are trying to acquire?
We’re keen in the dinosaur space. T-Rex, Triceratop, Stegosaurus, those are really the big three grails. We’ve been very deep in the manuscript space, too. We’ve started with Americana manuscripts, things like the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, US Constitution. These are all things that are incredibly scarce, incredibly hard to authenticate, but they’re all on our list.
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