“P7” Is Now the Most Expensive License Plate in the World, at $15 Million

Every year, the multi-millionaires and billionaires of the UAE gather in Dubai at the Four Seasons Hotel in Jumeirah, for something called the Most Noble Numbers charity auction. It’s a state-held event that aims to put into circulation the most coveted, single- or double-digit vanity plates with the money going to charity – the 1 Billion Meals Endowment campaign that will feed the poor, to be more precise.

If you’re a skeptic, you’ll see this for what it is: rich people getting the chance to own rare vanity plates, and pretending they’re doing it for charity. If you’re more of a glass-half-full kind of person, you’ll appreciate that the event raises a lot of cash every year for those in need, so the end probably justifies the means.

With every edition, some new kind of world record is shattered because, unsurprisingly, rich people’s ego knows no boundaries. However, one record has been holding strong since 2008, when one businessman paid $14.3 million (Dh52.2 million) for the “1” license plate, which then became the most expensive of all time.

At this year’s event, which was held last weekend, that record was broken, with “P7” taking the crown by selling for $15 million (Dh55 million). The difference between the two is not significant, especially by multi-millionaire standards, but it’s enough to establish a new world record, according to auction house Emirates Auction LLC.

The auction house mentions in a brief statement that the record is up to Guinness standards, which sounds like it in the process of being certified. Guinness hasn’t said anything on the topic yet, so maybe this is one of those unofficially-official records. Guinness certification probably means very little to the community of car enthusiasts and regular folk, or at least not as much as the fact that one man paid $15 million for a license plate, regardless of what’s on it.

To state the obvious, the people of Dubai live by an entirely different set of rules from the rest of the world, one where such amounts are justified for ownership of a “rare” plate.

For example, in 2022, one businessman told the BBC that he’d paid $9 million for the “D5” license plate because he was once denied entry at some fancy hotel where only single-digit cars were allowed. Still, he defended his decision to spend his cash like that by claiming that he only did it for charity, so that meant he was beyond being judged for it. The funniest part, though, was that he said all this while bragging on camera about how the plate was more than 10 times more expensive than the car it was on.