After 24 Years Hidden, Michael Jordan’s Ferrari 550 Maranello Obliterated The Model Record
Michael Jordan’s 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello sold for $2.7 million on September 30, blowing past the previous model record of $648,500 set just last August by more than four times over. The sale, run through Pharrell Williams’ Joopiter auction house in partnership with Miami dealer We Are Curated, also crushed its own $700,000 to $1.3 million pre-sale estimate.
For a car that spent 24 years completely off the grid, that’s a staggering result. It’s also a clear data point on what celebrity provenance is actually worth when the story is this good: Jordan drove this exact Ferrari out of the United Center hours after winning his fifth NBA championship, cigar in hand, trophy riding shotgun.
A Twenty-Four-Year Disappearance Finally Solved
Ferrari delivered the 550 Maranello to Jordan on May 29, 1997, finished in Rosso Barchetta over tan leather and ordered through Foreign Cars Italia in Greensboro, North Carolina. Because Jordan stands 6 feet 6 inches tall, the factory modified the seat tracks to slide further back and used slimmer padding so he could actually fit behind the wheel. He drove it with an Illinois vanity plate reading “MJ 5,” and it was still in his garage during the Bulls’ sixth title run in 1998.
Jordan sold the car in December 2002 with roughly 6,400 miles on the odometer, and from there it vanished into a private California collection for more than two decades. John Temerian, co-founder of the Miami-based dealership We Are Curated, spent years chasing it down, eventually reconstructing the full VIN from a partial chassis number found on an old online forum and matching it against Ferrari’s dealer records. He bought the car sight unseen. It returned to Chicago on May 29, 2026, exactly 29 years to the day after its original delivery, with 18,501 total miles on the clock.
What A Celebrity-Owned 550 Maranello Is Actually Worth
A typical 550 Maranello trades for around $200,000, and even the cleanest low-mileage examples have historically topped out near $600,000. That ceiling got redrawn in August when a 527-mile 1998 model sold for $648,500 through Broad Arrow Auctions, setting the previous record. Jordan’s car didn’t just beat that number, it lapped it, closing at $2.7 million after 43 bids over two weeks of online bidding.
Under the hood, the car is still a stock 550: a naturally aspirated 5.5-liter V12 making around 478 horsepower and roughly 420 lb-ft of torque, paired with a gated six-speed manual mounted in a rear transaxle for 50:50 weight distribution. Ferrari quotes a 4.4-second 0-62 time and a 199 mph top speed. It is the last analog V12 Ferrari, which is why that collectors are paying ridiculous amounts to acquire. Just 3,083 coupes were built between 1996 and 2002, alongside 448 open-top Barchetta variants, which already made the 550 a scarce grand tourer before Jordan’s name entered the picture.
What This Means For The Next Celebrity Ferrari
Joopiter called this its first auction in partnership with We Are Curated and its debut sale in the collector-car space after building its name on sports memorabilia and cultural artifacts. Landing a record of this size right out of the gate says plenty about where demand is heading for cars tied to 1990s and early 2000s icons rather than just prewar rarities or Enzo-era race cars.
The timing lines up with other high-dollar Jordan auctions, too. A day before the Ferrari sold, his game-worn jersey from Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals fetched $12.26 million, meaning collectors spent nearly $15 million across the two lots in under 48 hours. That kind of appetite suggests the baseline 550 market, already trending upward this year, now has an entirely new tier above it reserved for cars with a story this specific.
Sources: Joopiter
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