(Reuters) – A 1933 Double Eagle gold coin sold for $19.5 million at auction in New York on Tuesday, setting a new world record price for any coin.
The coin, the only one ever allowed to be privately owned, was expected to sell for between $10 million and $15 million at the Sotheby’s auction in New York.
It was sold by shoe designer and collector Stuart Weitzman who acquired it in 2002 for what was then a world record price of $7.6 million.
The buyer was not immediately known.
The coin, with its distinctive design of an American eagle in flight one side and Liberty striding forward on the other, was the last gold coin struck for circulation in the United States.
But the coin, with a face value of $20, was never issued after President Franklin Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard and all copies were ordered destroyed.
Weitzman, who has been collecting stamps and coins since boyhood, has said he will use the money from the sale of the coin, and two rare stamps, to fund his charitable ventures including medical research, his design school, and a Jewish museum in Madrid.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
