One 5090 now buys 0.76 of Uncle Jensen's jacket.

With my recent obsession with anything local LLM related, the tube algorithm has been hosing me down with videos and channels promoting the topic. One channel, devsplainers, is by far my favourite of the bunch. Yesterday they published this video- the 5090 pricing mess, and the developers building local rigs from retired data-centre GPUs and old mining cards instead. So I did what anyone with a chronic online presence would do: comment.

Jensen Huang has worn a black leather jacket to roughly every public appearance for at least 20 years. Nvidia's spokesperson confirmed it to the New York Times; the style, he has said, removes one set of decisions from his day. At the GTC 2024 keynote he showed up in the Tom Ford Tejus - a lizard-embossed leather jacket (embossed calf, not lizard, since exotic skins are banned in California) that retails for $8,990.¹ That's our unit of account for this post.

In July 2026, a signed Tom Ford jacket - the one he wore to a Foxconn event in Taipei in 2023 - went to auction at Sotheby's. The pre-sale estimate was $40,000-$60,000. Forty-five collectors placed 65 bids. It sold for $960,000 - 96 times retail, with proceeds going to the Edge Institute.² Mark Zuckerberg, having received one of the jackets in a 2024 "jersey swap", summed up the economics: "This is worth more because it's used."

The RTX 5090 launched on 30 January 2025 at a $1,999 MSRP and instantly sold out. Scalpers had listings within a day. It took nine months for the card to appear at its list price in the US - in Europe it took five. Then 2026 happened: data-centre demand swallowed the world's GDDR7 and DRAM supply, Nvidia passed memory-cost increases to its board partners three separate times in a year, and the MSRP - frozen at $1,999 the whole time - stopped meaning anything. ³

A retailer that has tracked a 5090 daily since 10 June 2026 shows the current climb: $4,270 in June, $4,200 at the end of July, $6,810 on 20 August, a peak of $7,369.90 on 12 September, and $6,795.99 as of 22 September - 240% above MSRP.

For eight months - from launch until September 2025 - the sticker price was worth 0.22 of a jacket. A quarter of Uncle Jensen's outfit, on paper: in practice, buying one meant paying scalpers, and at the $7,000 peak that was already 0.78 of a jacket. You needed four and a half cards at MSRP to fund one jacket purchase, which was always going to end the way all funding rounds end.

Now the card is worth 0.76 of a jacket, and the line is still climbing toward 1.00. The funny version of what this means: a 5090 at today's street price buys you three-quarters of a Tom Ford. The serious version: Nvidia's official price has not moved in 20 months, and the entire gap between the sticker and the shelf is memory costs being passed through a retail channel that is being quietly outbid by data centres.

Every 5090 purchase still funds the jacket addiction - it just funds it a lot more efficiently now.

The real asset class, though, is the jacket. $960,000 is 480 5090s at MSRP, or 141 at today's street price. A single piece of worn clothing now clears at auction for the price of a small GPU rack, and it's the only thing in this whole market that went up 96 times instead of 2.4. The compute-nomenon - the RAMpocalypse, call it what you like - turned a CEO's wardrobe into a collectible, and the only rational investment thesis left in hardware is: buy the jacket. And can we please stop calling any of this "AI" while we're at it? We made the case over here.

(Which is exactly why we don't own a 5090. The maths were never on our side; the jacket was always going to outperform.)

*while downing a flat white and refusing to buy a GPU