10 Celebrity Purchases So Wild They Sound Made Up

Rich celebrities can buy almost anything they want, which is how you end up with purchases involving dinosaur skulls, medieval castles, million-dollar comic books, and pieces of pop culture history that probably belong behind museum glass.

Some of these buys happened at major auctions. Others came through dealers, estates, galleries, or competitive private sales. Either way, the numbers involved are enough to make an ordinary impulse purchase look downright responsible.

Here are 10 celebrity purchases that sound like somebody made them up, but actually happened.

Lady Gaga did not buy just one Michael Jackson souvenir. At a 2012 Julien's Auctions sale, she announced that she had purchased 55 pieces from Jackson's wardrobe and memorabilia collection. Gaga said she planned to preserve the items carefully in honor of Jackson and his fans. The auction itself included elaborate jackets, stage costumes, shoes, gloves, and other pieces spanning Jackson's career. Exactly which 55 lots Gaga won was not publicly itemized, but apparently normal souvenir shopping was never really an option here.

Nicolas Cage once spent $276,000 on the skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar after reportedly beating Leonardo DiCaprio in the bidding. Unfortunately, the story did not end with an extremely impressive conversation piece sitting peacefully in Cage's house. Federal investigators later determined that the roughly 70-million-year-old fossil had been illegally removed from Mongolia. Cage was not accused of wrongdoing and voluntarily surrendered the skull so it could be returned to Mongolia. It may be the only purchase on this list that required international fossil diplomacy.

Cage's collecting habits were not limited to prehistoric remains. In 1996, he paid $150,000 for a remarkably well-preserved copy of Action Comics No. 1, the 1938 comic that introduced Superman. The comic was stolen from Cage's home in 2000 and remained missing for more than a decade before turning up in a California storage locker in 2011. After it was returned, Cage sold it for roughly $2.2 million. The same copy changed hands again in 2026 for an astonishing $15 million. Not a bad return on a comic that originally cost 10 cents.

When Christie's auctioned Elizabeth Taylor's jewelry collection in 2011, Kim Kardashian came away with three jade and diamond bangles created by Lorraine Schwartz. The bracelets had been expected to bring around $8,000. Kardashian paid $64,900. She had long described Taylor as an idol and said owning something that had belonged to her felt especially meaningful. Apparently sentimental value becomes considerably more expensive once a bidding paddle gets involved.

Lady Gaga has never exactly approached fashion casually. In 2012, she paid $133,075 at Christie's for an ivory Alexander McQueen gown from the collection of Daphne Guinness. The price set an auction record for a McQueen dress at the time. Proceeds from the sale benefited the Isabella Blow Foundation. For most people, six figures buys a house in some parts of the country. For Gaga, it bought one extremely elaborate dress.

Because apparently two Nicolas Cage entries were not enough, the actor bought Schloss Neidstein in Bavaria in 2006 for a reported $2.6 million. The historic property had 28 rooms and sat amid hundreds of acres of forest and meadows. Cage began restoring it but eventually sold the castle in 2009 amid financial difficulties. Plenty of people have made regrettable real-estate purchases. Far fewer can say theirs included an actual German castle.

Mariah Carey was a longtime admirer of Marilyn Monroe, so when Monroe's belongings were auctioned by Christie's in 1999, one item stood out. Carey paid $662,500 for Monroe's white baby grand piano, far above its original estimate. The instrument had special meaning to Monroe because it had belonged to her mother, Gladys, and Monroe had spent years trying to locate and recover it after it was sold. Carey later said she wanted to protect the piano and hoped it would eventually end up in a museum.

In 2007, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie reportedly spent about $2 million on a Banksy work during an art auction at London's Lazarides Gallery. The event featured works from major contemporary artists, but Banksy's rapidly rising reputation made his pieces some of the hottest items in the room. Pitt had already developed a reputation as a serious art collector, although $2 million still feels like an aggressive way to prove you enjoy graffiti.

Johnny Depp's fascination with the Beat Generation went beyond reading the books. During the 1990s, he acquired Jack Kerouac's old raincoat from the writer's estate. Contemporary reports put the price somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000, with later accounts commonly citing $15,000. Depp also acquired other Kerouac belongings. Buying a dead author's old coat is already pretty committed fandom. Paying five figures for it removes any remaining doubt.

This was not a traditional auction, but it may be the biggest celebrity bidding victory on the list. In 1985, Michael Jackson paid $47.5 million for ATV Music Publishing after months of negotiations and competing interest from other buyers. The company controlled publishing rights to 251 Lennon-McCartney Beatles songs along with a much larger catalog of other music. The deal became one of the most famous music-publishing purchases ever and eventually helped form the foundation of Sony/ATV Music Publishing. Compared with a dinosaur skull, a castle, and Superman's first comic book, this might actually have been the sensible purchase.