7-Time Super Bowl Champion — Fox Sports Analyst • Impaulsive with Logan Paul

Tom Brady's Audemars Piguet Royal Oak: Beyond the Daytona

The world knows Tom Brady wears Rolex. What it sees less often is the other side of his collection — the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, worn here on Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, and the deeper watch literacy it reveals.

Tom Brady on Impaulsive with the AP Royal Oak. Source: Impaulsive / Logan Paul

The Royal Oak's octagonal bezel — Gerald Genta's 1972 design, unchanged in its essentials ever since.

There are athletes whose careers are so dominant they become measurements. Tom Brady is one of them. Seven Super Bowl championships, three NFL Most Valuable Player awards, 23 seasons at the highest level of the sport — these are not just biographical facts but calibration points against which everyone else in the game is assessed. He retired in February 2023 (the second time; the first, in 2022, lasted forty days), and moved directly into the next phase: Fox Sports lead NFL analyst, minority stakeholder in the Las Vegas Raiders, and a public life that continues to unfold at the same velocity as his playing career.

Brady has also become, in retirement, one of the sport's most visible watch collectors. His relationship with Audemars Piguet goes back years, cultivated through a friendship with former AP CEO François-Henry Bennahmias — the executive who transformed the brand into one of watchmaking's most coveted names during his three-decade tenure. Brady has worn AP Royal Oaks across his public life: at a Birmingham City FC football match in England, where he wore a rare one-of-two Royal Oak Grande Complication; on Instagram, where he posted his Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar with the caption "One of my fav fav. Thanks François." And here, on Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast — off the red carpet, off the sideline, in the kind of setting where you wear the watch you actually want to wear.

That is the distinction worth noticing. Brady reaches for Rolex when the cameras are at their most formal. He reaches for AP when the conversation is more relaxed, more personal. It tells you something about where the Royal Oak sits in his hierarchy.

"I think you can start with your watch or you can end with your watch. It's an expression of style, and this permanence of time on your wrist." — Tom Brady, Esquire

Timepiece

Audemars Piguet Royal Oak — Le Brassus, 1972

Audemars Piguet was founded in 1875 in Le Brassus, in the Swiss Vallée de Joux, by Jules-Louis Audemars and Edward-Auguste Piguet. For nearly a century, it operated as a specialist in complicated movements — minute repeaters, perpetual calendars, tourbillons — for other maisons. Then, in 1972, it did something that changed watchmaking entirely. The company commissioned designer Gerald Genta to create a luxury sports watch in stainless steel — a material then considered beneath Haute Horlogerie — and price it at a premium that shocked the industry. The result was the Royal Oak.

The octagonal bezel, secured by eight exposed hexagonal screws, was inspired by a diver's helmet. The integrated bracelet, tapering from the case with machined precision, had no precedent in the industry. The Tapisserie dial — the distinctive small-square guilloché pattern — was a Genta signature. It was simultaneously the most expensive steel watch in the world and the most controversial. Five decades later, it is the most copied design in luxury watchmaking and the foundation of a brand worth billions. Brady has worn several references from the Royal Oak family; the complication spotted on Impaulsive is consistent with his preference for the Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar and related Grand Complications.

Reference	Royal Oak (specific complication confirmed from episode images)
Case	Stainless steel or precious metal; octagonal bezel, integrated bracelet
Movement	Audemars Piguet in-house automatic; complication varies by reference
Market price	From $25,000 (standard Royal Oak) to $500,000+ (Grand Complications)

A Collector, Not a Collector's Item

Brady's relationship with Audemars Piguet is not a brand endorsement — he is contracted to IWC Schaffhausen. The AP on his wrist is his own, bought with his own money, chosen because he wanted it. That is a meaningful distinction. The watch brands that pay celebrities to wear their products generate a certain kind of visibility. The watches a collector chooses on their own time tell a different story: what they actually find compelling, what they return to when the cameras are more casual, what earns a permanent place in the rotation.

Brady told Esquire that his watch collecting began twenty years ago with two pieces — a self-reward, a promise made and kept to himself when the money arrived. Since then, he has built a collection serious enough to send to Sotheby's, where his Royal Oak Tourbillon custom-made for the Netflix Roast sold for $720,000 against a $400,000 estimate, and a 1969 Rolex Daytona Paul Newman "John Player Special" went for $1.14 million. This is not a man who treats watches as accessories. He understands them.

Why This Watch on This Wrist

The Royal Oak is the watch for people who have moved past wanting the most recognisable thing. It is recognisable — enormously so, in the right company — but it is not the automatic choice, not the first name that appears in any non-enthusiast's mental list of expensive watches. Choosing it requires having already been through that list and decided to go somewhere more interesting. Brady sat across from Logan Paul on Impaulsive with the octagonal bezel and Tapisserie dial on his wrist, not the Daytona, not the Land-Dweller. The Royal Oak is where his own taste runs when no one is curating the image for him. After twenty-plus years of building one of the most controlled public personas in American sport, that is exactly the kind of spot worth noticing.

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