The Nobel Peace Prize, which Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned off to raise money for Ukrainian child refugees, sold for $103.5 million on Monday night, smashing the previous record for a Nobel.
The buyer's identity could not be confirmed by Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale, although the winning bid was made by proxy, according to a representative. The transaction price of $103.5 million is equivalent to $100 million Swiss francs, indicating that the buyer is from another country.
"I was hoping for a lot of solidarity, but I wasn't anticipating this much," Muratov said in an interview after the nearly three-week auction closed on World Refugee Day.
The previous record for the highest price paid for a Nobel Prize medal was $4.76 million in 2014, when James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA in 1962, sold his. Three years later, Heritage Auctions got $2.27 million from the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick.
Muratov, who received the gold medal in October 2021, was the editor-in-chief of the independent Russian daily Novaya Gazeta when it closed down in March amid the Kremlin's crackdown on journalists and public opposition following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Muratov came up with the notion of auctioning off his reward after announcing that he would donate the $500,000 cash prize to charity.
Muratov has stated that the funds will go directly to UNICEF to aid children displaced by the Ukraine conflict. UNICEF informed the auction company that it had already received the monies minutes after the bidding finished.
Online bidding began on June 1 to coincide with the celebration of International Children's Day. Many bids were submitted over the phone or online. The winning bid, made over the phone, propelled the bidding from the millions to the billions.
Muratov departed Russia on Thursday for New York City, where live bidding began on Monday evening.
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