This Is The Asteroid Watch, a $1.2 Million Timepiece That Comes Directly From Space

In the world of haute horlogerie, few things haven't been done before. You have timepieces designed for sports, with automotive influences, to compliment one-off cars, to masquerade as pieces of jewelry, and to set new records for weight, thinness, and number of complications. In the world of the rich, the sky – and the skill of the watchmaker – is the only limit there is.

But the sky doesn't have to be the limit, as The Asteroid watch shows. Dubbed either the most creative, biggest flex around, or the ugliest watch to have ever existed, The Asteroid is divisive, and that's putting it very lightly.

It is a flex – and was designed like one from the start – but it's also a highly-engineered piece that puts the owner at the center of the universe. That last part is not literal.

The Asteroid was introduced in 2017 and, to this day, has not found an owner. Its reported price tag is between $1 million and $1.2 million, depending on who you ask, but as far as we can tell, it's never been available for actual purchase. It's featured on the official Greco-Genève website with a lengthy introduction but no mention of pricing or an add-to-cart button, which could hint that it's only been created for publicity.

So what is it that makes The Asteroid such a divisive, if not downright controversial timepiece? The answer to that is in its name, which comes from the fact that it was carved out of a piece of meteorite that fell from the Asteroid belt in Argentina. Stephane Greco, who founded Greco-Genève only 10 years before he created The Asteroid, is a chemist by education and his goal was, from the start, to create atypical watches that inspire awe.

All Greco-Genève watches stand out, but none so like The Asteroid, which looks like a piece of rock on a strap, on a wrist, although it admittedly doesn't feel that way because it's surprisingly comfortable to wear. By putting a piece of space on one man's wrist, Greco is aiming for comparisons to man being the center of the universe.

He's also drawing parallelisms to the film Predator, the 1987 classic with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which an alien being all but massacres every human but Schwarzenegger's character. In the final scene, the alien puts in a self-destruct program on a watch-like device on his forearm. The same characters that only this alien could read are also visible on The Asteroid watch and its custom stand.

But there's a secret to being able to see them. Not that we could ever read them, unless we learned to speak Predator.

Like all Greco-Genève watches, this one, too, comes with a dial that becomes fluorescent under ultraviolet light. Greco uses a very specific material, a sodium powder that creates fluorescence in special conditions. It's a patented feature, so of course it was included on The Asteroid to add even more drama to an already overly-dramatic creation.

The red skeletonized dial hides a Swiss-made Unitas ETA 6497-1 manual-winding movement with 17 jewels and functions like hours and minutes. It doesn't need any more than that, because the point is to attract attention through its space origins, not functionality. Power reserve is approximately 40 hours. The movement is visible through the transparent caseback, assuming anyone would ever look past the chunky case itself to wonder what makes the watch tick.

The Asteroid is paired with a leather strap that matches the color and mimics the texture of the rock and a custom stand seemingly made of steel. Exact dimensions of the timepiece were never revealed, but from whatever materials available online, you can tell it's big, chunky, and as ungracious as you'd expect a watch made of a meteorite to be.

"It's not a watch that will please everyone," Greco himself said a short while after its introduction. "But its atypical side, a sci-fi film genre that will arouses curiosity and interest around this unique object." He also stressed that The Asteroid wasn't just a world first, but a galaxial first.

He's not wrong, of course. He's not wrong on any of these counts.

The Asteroid is a timepiece that isn't just disliked by most but passionately hated by regular watch enthusiasts. That said, it's still arousing curiosity and fueling debates even after all these years while also standing for the biggest flex possible. When you can brag about wearing a piece of space on your wrist, what's the chance of being outdone by anyone else?

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