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Comment by yason | Hacker News Reader

I can only ask "Why?"

It's the buyer's call of course but generally things that have no obvious utilitarian value are bought for either of two reasons: future value (expected rise in value or expected keep of current value) or emotional reasons (such as belongings of close, personally meaningful people or beautiful items).

It's hard to imagine vibrant aftermarkets for these founding papers so it must be a combination of feeling closely connected to Apple's founders and huge amounts of money: enough for a million to become peanuts.

Still the money alone wouldn't explain it: I probably could pay one 1/1000th of my annual income (that'd be one million if I earned a billion each year) for those papers but I wouldn't because I can't think of a reason why.

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"It's hard to imagine vibrant aftermarkets for these founding papers..."

Is it so hard, though? From reading the article, one gets the sense that there's already been a very vibrant aftermarket for these papers to date. From an initial selling price of "a couple thousand dollars" in 1994, they've risen in value to $1.6MM. Assuming the original price was $2000, that's a 79,900% increase in value in 17 years. (For the sake of comparison: the price of Apple stock has increased by about 921% between December 12, 1994 and today).

Memorabilia, antiques, and artifacts -- even the seemingly random ones -- can be extremely lucrative investments. True, there isn't always an obvious aftermarket; many of these items are purchased as curiosities or personal bragging tokens. But if one is able to create an aftermarket for them, the sky is the limit.

Who would purchase these papers from Mr. Cisneros at a sum higher than $1.6MM? It's tough to say, but I can see quite a few possibilities. Other rich guys, museums, charitable foundations, corporations, and hell, maybe even Apple itself. Maybe Woz gets sentimental one day, can't find his own copies, or decides he wants more copies, and buys them from this guy. Who knows? There are a lot of potential buyers.

The reason to buy them at that price is bragging rights. You probably just lack the required vanity, and that's a good thing.

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

"One thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many degrees of it." --PG

With 20K in seed funding, that 1.6M could help to start 80 startups. Even with the claimed 90% failure rate, the odds are you'd have 8 successful companies employing people, creating wealth, adding value, and providing things people want. It may not result in bragging rights amongst the rich and famous, but the world would be a better place. It's not the wealth of seed and angel investors that's impressive, instead, it's what they do with their money. Extravagance like this auction makes the differences painfully clear.

Well...the 1.6 million dollars didn't mysteriously disappear when these documents were sold, they were exchanged with someone who will presumably at some point use them for something else. So the purchase was definitely extravagant, but no one was hurt in the process.

The USA considers its founding documents pretty valuable and spends a lot of money to keep and preserve them:

http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/pictures-of-decl...

Are they necessary to keep around? Do they have any material value?

whats to say it wont rise in value in years to come? Most people who buy apple products etc do indeed feel closely connected to the comapny (regardless if they are infact or not). Definately something I wouldnt be spending that amount of money on but each to their own....but then I dont have that sort of money to throw about

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