The buyer who paid a record $44.6 million to buy a stegosaurus fossil at auction was Ken Griffin, CEO of hedge fund Citadel, according to a person familiar with the acquisition.
The skeleton, nicknamed Apex, is estimated to be 150 million years old and is the largest stegosaurus ever discovered, according to the auction house.
Griffin placed his bid over the phone to beat six others in a 15-minute bidding war, with a live audience cheering as the price rose.
“Apex was born in America and will stay in America,” he said after the sale, according to the Wall Street Journal, which revealed that Griffin was the buyer.
A regular Republican donor, the hedge fund chief has a net worth of about $37.8 billion, according to Forbes.
He plans to study the possibility of lending the specimen to an American institution, the source told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The CEO has worked with museums before. In 2021, he paid $43.2 million for a copy of the first edition of the U.S. Constitution, which he then loaned to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.
He also helped fund a dinosaur exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago in 2018 with a $16.5 million donation.
His latest purchase measures 3.3 metres high and 8.2 metres long, and is almost complete, with 254 bones out of an approximate total of 319.
Dinosaur remains have become a hot commodity in recent years, with paleontologists expressing concern that museums are losing ground to private buyers.
The previous record for a dinosaur skeleton sale was set in 2020, when a Tyrannosaurus Rex nicknamed “Stan” sold for $31.8 million.
Apex is 30% larger than ‘Sophie’, the most complete stegosaurus ever on public display, which is housed at the Natural History Museum in London.