A Basketball Card Nearly Outsold the 13th Amendment

In the summer of 2025, eight weeks apart, two men bought two signatures. One was Abraham Lincoln's, on the amendment that abolished slavery. The other was Michael Jordan's and Kobe Bryant's, on a piece of cardboard with bits of their jerseys glued to it. The prices were $13.7 million and $12.932 million. Go ahead and read that again.

Quick note on sources before we start, because this piece throws a lot of numbers around. Everything below is an auction house's own reported result or a price the buyer stated publicly, and each one is dated. Where a figure is somebody's opinion of what a thing is worth today rather than a price somebody actually paid, we say so. There is a lot of the second kind floating around in this corner of the market.

The card

On August 23, 2025, which would have been Kobe Bryant's birthday, Heritage Auctions sold a 2007-08 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection Dual Logoman. One of one. Both signatures on the card, plus NBA logo patches cut from jerseys both men actually wore. Jordan's is the gold logo from the league's 50th anniversary season. It is graded PSA 6, which is worth sitting with for a second: the most expensive sports card ever sold is a six.

Heritage had it estimated at $6 million. The hammer came down at $10.6 million, and with the buyer's premium the total was $12,932,000. The buyers were Kevin O'Leary, collector Matt Allen and entrepreneur Paul Warshaw, who got on a three in the morning video call to decide whether to keep going. O'Leary's version is that bidding ran from around $8 million to almost $13 million overnight, and that he woke up owning it.

That price beat the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, which sold for $12.6 million in August 2022, and made this the most expensive sports card in history.

The other signature

Now rewind to June 26, 2025. Sotheby's New York, Fine Books and Manuscripts. Kenneth Griffin, the Citadel founder, bids $12 million on the phone for a handwritten copy of the 13th Amendment signed by Lincoln and by the congressmen and senators who passed it. With fees the total is $13.7 million.

Fifteen copies are known to carry Lincoln's signature. Nine were signed by Lincoln together with the legislators. Four of those nine are in private hands, and this one carries more lawmaker signatures than any other. The previous record for a copy was $2.4 million, set in 2016, so this cleared the old mark by more than five times.

Griffin bought a signed Emancipation Proclamation the same morning for $4.4 million, also a record, and said he intends to lend both to an American institution.

So: eight weeks and $770,000 separate the document that ended American slavery from a basketball card. Whatever you think that says about us, it is what the market did.

The all-time signed leaderboard

Put every signed thing on one list and it looks like this.

Lincoln's 13th Amendment leads at $13.7 million, June 2025. Then Jordan and Kobe at $12.932 million, August 2025. Then Shohei Ohtani's back-to-back dual Gold Logoman at a reported $11 million in July 2026, though that one sold privately and the figure comes from the buyer rather than an auction record. Then Jordan and LeBron on a 2006-07 Exquisite dual autograph at $10 million in September 2025.

And only then, in fifth, George Washington.

Washington's own annotated copy of the Acts of Congress, with his signature at the top and his handwritten brackets beside the passages about presidential power, sold at Christie's on June 22, 2012 for $9,826,500. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association bought it and took it home. For thirteen years that was the most anyone had ever paid for a signature, full stop.

Four signed trading cards have now gone past it, three of them in a thirteen-month window.

Below that the list is mostly cardboard too. LeBron's 2003-04 Exquisite rookie patch autograph, numbered to 23, went for $5.2 million in April 2021. An Aaron Judge 2013 Bowman Chrome superfractor autograph matched it at $5.2 million in March 2026. Luka Doncic's National Treasures Logoman auto made $4.6 million in February 2021, Patrick Mahomes' National Treasures rookie $4.3 million in July 2021, and Mike Trout's 2009 Bowman Chrome superfractor autograph $3.936 million in August 2020.

Slotted in among them: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation at $4.4 million, and Einstein's "God letter", handwritten and signed in 1954, at $2,892,500 at Christie's in December 2018. The Einstein letter had sold for $404,000 in 2008, which is a reminder that this whole market has been on the same escalator.

About that $20 million

O'Leary has since said on television that the Jordan and Kobe card is worth $17 million, then over $17.2 million, then close to $20 million, and that a Jordan-Bryant-LeBron Triple Logoman he owns is worth $25 to $30 million. Those numbers come from Card Ladder's valuations, and Card Ladder itself is doing something genuinely hard: pricing a one-of-one with no comparable sales, because by definition there are none.

Treat all of it as a mark, not a price. The only number anybody can prove about that card is $12,932,000 on August 23, 2025, and the only way to discover the next one is to sell it, which the owners say they will not do for at least a decade.

The punchline

Here is the thing that should bother anyone who cares about autographs.

The most expensive trading card ever sold has no signature on it at all.

On February 15, 2026, Goldin sold Logan Paul's 1998 Pikachu Illustrator, graded PSA 10, after a 41-day auction and 97 bids. The hammer was $13.3 million and the total with the premium was $16,492,000. The buyer was AJ Scaramucci. Roughly 39 were ever printed as prizes in a Japanese magazine contest, and Paul's is the only one to hold a PSA 10. He paid $5.275 million for it in 2021.

That card beat Jordan and Kobe by three and a half million dollars, and it beat Lincoln by nearly three. A drawing of a cartoon mouse holding a paintbrush is now worth more than any signature in recorded history.

Which tells you what the signature is actually doing in these prices. It is not the ink. Nobody paid $12.9 million because Jordan and Kobe held a pen. They paid it because the two of them signed the same object exactly once, and because after January 2020 they never can again. The autograph is the thing that makes the object unrepeatable. That is the whole product.

Same reason the Lincoln document cost what it did. Not the handwriting. The fact that there are nine of them and there will never be a tenth.