The story of the $40 million Ferrari Luce sold at auction felt, at first, like another unhappy reminder of how impossible it is to buy a Ferrari and how fanatical its followers are about trying to impress the company. Outside the circle drive of the Portola Hotel where the auction was held, I heard a jaded journalist joke that maybe it was time to bring back the guillotine shortly after the gavel dropped.
Even the well-heeled inside the RM Auction murmured unfounded assumptions that something odd seemed afoot, maybe money laundering. The vibes were a mix of shock and disgust, with the exception of one slightly inebriated young man who said he knew who the winner was. They’re all wrong, he seemed to imply. The winner was just a generous inventor finding a fun way to give money to charity.
The name of the bidder has been revealed and that drunk kid was probably closer to the truth than most.
Meet Dr. Herbert Wertheim, A Self-Made Inventor Whose Products You Probably Use Every Day
I get the instinct. I do. A $40 million check for a car that’s got no history, and no provenance seems wrong. It cleared a price higher than the most important Shelby Daytona (before fees).
However, if you were to go into a lab in order to develop a human being with the most sympathetic upbringing, you could hardly improve on Dr. Herbert Wertheim. This is the son of immigrants, whose family moved to the United States in pursuit of a better life.
According to Wertheim himself, in an interview for an award, it wasn’t exactly a happy home. He lived above the family’s meager bakery in Florida, trying to dodge an abusive father. Eventually, his mother left, but the courts kept young Herbert in the shop with his dad to help with the business.
By the time he was 16, he repeatedly ran away from home and was caught and sent to juvenile hall, where a judge gave him a choice: Live in a reformatory or join the Navy. He wisely chose the Navy.
“I got three meals a day, a place to sleep, and a great education. The more I learned, the more they taught me, I loved it. The Navy was my mother and father and family,” he says. “To this day, it was one of the most important parts of my life. My success in life would not have been possible without the Navy’s guidance, encouragement, and help.”
After finishing his electronics course, Wertheim went to guided missile school. At the same time, he took dozens of Navy correspondence courses. After graduating near the top of his class, he went on to become a naval aviator, frogman, and diver. Upon his discharge in 1960, armed with a GED certificate that he earned while in the Navy, he attended Brevard Community College near Cape Canaveral, Florida, as a full-time pre-medical and engineering student. To support himself, he sold Collier encyclopedias and worked the night shift for General Dynamics and NASA.
As a NASA engineer, Wertheim helped design vision and neurological instrumentation systems. His work at NASA got him interested in vision, so he applied for and was accepted at the Southern College of Optometry in Memphis. He won a scholarship, which helped with his tuition. Wertheim had to work to pay all the other living expenses.
Wertheim is a serial inventor and, after graduating and starting a practice, he continued to develop instruments and tools. He was one of the first medical professionals to discover a link between UV light and cataracts, leading him to invent the UV-tinted sunglasses that nearly everyone uses now. Eventually, Wertheim stopped seeing patients so he could focus full-time on inventing tools to help people retain their sight.
Even if you can agree that his wealth has been honestly earned, I understand the compulsion to question the impulse to spend money in a way that seems so extravagant. Is this just a ploy to get in good with Ferrari? Maybe. But is the second time that Dr. Wertheim has purchased a Ferrari at auction to support The Ferrari Foundation; I think he’s probably well established with the automaker.
Bryant Kreaden, the former manager of Ferrari of Beverly Hills, correctly guessed this person was more interested in the charity part of the transaction than the actual vehicle. Via DM he told us that “all the haters can now shut up … it was for a good cause.”
While the underbidder at the auction was apparently another major Ferrari collector, Wertheim is more established as a major philanthropist. Certainly, there’s some ability to get a tax write-off, but both Wertheim and his then-wife Nicole signed The Giving Pledge (a non-binding agreement to give away the majority of one’s wealth to charitable causes in their lifetimes). One of the big focuses of the couple’s giving is aiding the endowments of public colleges and universities, stating that:
Many of America’s private universities have more than 20 times the endowments of most public institutions of higher learning, and our state legislators are decreasing funding to these public institutions that needs to be made up by private funding. The Wertheim family’s talent, time and energy will be dedicated to The Wertheim Family Foundation’s future efforts to support the endowments of public universities and colleges
To date, he’s pledged or given at least $100 million to create a cancer center at Baptist Health South Florida, $100 million to the University of Florida, $50 million to UC Berkeley, another $65 million to Florida International University, and now another $50+ million to the Ferrari Foundation.
Apparently, Being A Billionaire ‘Is Not So Easy’
Here’s an interesting quote from NPR:
“You know, being a billionaire is not so easy. I’m serious when I say that. If you have a billion dollars, you have to figure out some way to give away $100 million 10 times. If you have 4 or 5 billion, you have to figure out 50 times how to give away $100 million. And to do it sensibly and with good judgment,” Wertheim told NPR.
Giving away the money hit the additional snag when Wertheim’s wife, Nicole, filed for divorce a couple of years ago. This led to a custody battle over the couple’s multi-billion dollar fortune, as Forbes reports. Nicole Wertheim passed away earlier this year, so the management of the charitable foundation appears to have reverted to Dr. Wertheim (though family drama continues as the couple’s daugher, Erica Wertheim Zohar, insinuated in a piece in the LA Times that her dad had quashed memorial tributes for his deceased ex-wife).
With complete control of the money, Wertheim has decided that Ferrari’s charity is a nice addition to his giving portfolio. The Ferrari Foundation has a broad remit, so it’s hard to pin down the one specific thing it does, though it’s fair to guess that, with a backer like Wertheim, education will be a key part of the mission going forward. Indeed, the foundation recently supported the rebuilding of the Aveson Charter School, which burned down in the Eaton fire in Altadena, California, down the coast from where the auction happened.
Can I be certain that Dr. Wertheim had no other motives and was entirely pure of heart with this gift? Of course not. His schtick is wearing red hats everywhere, and some of his donations are not ones I’d make. I’ll just say that there were a lot of conspicuous and obscene displays of wealth on hand during the week in Monterey, and, amazingly, the biggest cash drop of the weekend no longer seems to me like the most egregious of them.
Top photo: Ferrari
All credit goes to the author somewhere on a smart article online:
He seems to have some great accomplishments, but he’s part of the Palm Beach FL crowd, ran for office as a Republican and paid $2,000,000 to meet with trump: https://fortune.com/2026/02/03/herbert-wertheim-2-million-dollar-bid-trump-meeting/
Reading the headline, I was thinking Wertheim was a Red-Hatted Linux guy, but I was obviously wrong.
Possible family dramas aside, he sounds like a pretty decent guy. He’s managed to get his name on a lot of stuff without besmirching the Kennedy Center or hanging Third Reich-esque portraits of himself from Federal buildings.
This guy seems eccentric enough to actually drive the car around town. Hope he gets to enjoy it for $40 big ones.
A Fedora? I do like weird hat choices.
I’m a fedora wearer myself, not at all weird, but not red.
A silverbelly stratoliner, with a tiny Boing 307 on the grosgrain, but I have seen some big cowboy hats reblocked as fedoras. Supposedly that is what Orson Wells’s hats were. Apparently he thought a huge hat would make him look small.
I hope this guy lives in Berkeley so I can run into him and shake his hand and chat about cars.
I almost feel compelled to comment a mea culpa since I was SO SURE of the BS behind the boisterous bid. But I was wrong, which I suppose isn’t surprising.
You can’t be a billionaire and ask for any sympathy about being a billionaire. I think struggling to feed your kids and not having a guaranteed roof over your head is harder than giving away money. But I understand that you also have hundreds of people asking for it, and it’s not exactly easy or even feasible to vet everything. But just maybe shut up about it?
People forget that often the quotes they read were prompted by a question, which is then conveniently not included with the quote (not accusing Autopian here but more likely the original article.) I see a lot of this in journalism.
True, and I really should remember that. Presenting things out of context is a really easy way to shape the narrative.
Kudos! Yeah if I was a billionaire, I’d do my best NOT to bring it up.
So you’re telling me I was outbid on this thing by a freaking encyclopedia salesman?! Great. That’s just great.
By far the most elaborate way to buy a sports car post divorce.
This article helped lower my blood pressure from reading the headlines yesterday. Good for him.
I’m surprised at the number of people that don’t think Ferrari’s first EV will be worth quite a bit in 25 to 50 years.
I think it’ll probably follow the same depreciation curve as the first Tesla Roadster. So long term it’ll be worth more than its sticker price, but never £40,000,000.
Tesla isn’t Ferrari.
It will be interesting to see what happens to gasoline collector car values in the coming decades when production cars are electric.
They must be the two brands with the most rabid fans though.
It won’t be drivable in 25 years after degradation of battery pack and nobody making that tech anymore. EV’s are disposable paper weights….
It will sit in a billionaire’s warehouse under a tarp just find. As to tech, people are still keeping EVs from 100 years ago running / driving.
Yes, they are lead acid with no electronics.
Apples to oranges bro.
I guess you missed the recent article about the 1918 Detroit Electric Model 75B Brougham coupe updated to lithium ion batteries.
People go to ridiculous lengths to restore antique cars, sticking some new batteries in this will be easy.
Ok sport.
Exactly. This is a future collectible.
Is he hanging out with George Hamilton in that top photo?
ahhh, we can all see clearly now.
Since I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Luce (despite having rosso corsa flowing through my veins) I investigated the car in the lede photo.
That’s a Tailor Made Daytona SP3, and he bought that last year at the RM auction at Monterey for $26,000,000.
Having nearly $5,000,000,000 in wealth allows such extravagances, I guess.
That’s the neat trick, most billionaires don’t. They just use stocks as collateral over and over to avoid capital gains tax. In one fell swoop, he avoided capital gains tax, got a charitable tax write off, and still got a valuable appreciating asset out of it.
It must be nice to live with a tax code that benefits you instead of hindering you.
as long as you can afford to pay accountants, the tax code always benefits you.
Counterpoint: his wikipedia page is flagged for COI: Self-editing. It takes a special person to repeatedly get tagged for that, and it’s not because of their honesty…
To go with that, why an engineering school in Italy and not something that would have an impact in the US?
Matt listed UC Berkley y and Florida colleges too.
Forget about the Luce and the red Fedora .. how about those Air Max 95’s??
I know he’s 87…. But did he pee his pants in that first picture?
Also, from what I have read about this guy, the red hat fits.
He’s a billionaire, he gets to pee where and when he likes.
Why doesn’t he just do what all the other billionaires do make a family office to donate and manage investments. Still the same thing money going to weird causes that benefit certain factions as well as high administrative costs. It’s all just a song and dance, “good cause” is always used in the nonsense fundraising world. They can’t cite the “good cause” but trust me it’s a good cause.
The Giving Pledge sounds a lot like Brewster’s Millions.
It always seemed like PR to distract people from taxing the rich. And it worked. Just look at all the scam charitable trusts that are “giving” and who they give too.
Also lets not fawn over someone with 5 billion who commits to (eventually) whittling it down to a mere 2.5. It’s definitely better than nothing, but c’mon…
I thought that during the auction they said that the sale of the Luce was going to benefit the Ferrari Foundation in building an engineering school in Italy, but I was also at least an edible deep then.
But still him giving $40 million is probably around the same % as me giving $40
TL;DR: Millionaire inventor donated 40 million to charity in a way that doesn’t raise suspicions. Actual Ferrari EV is worthless.
*multi-billionaire
He has nearly 5,000 millions.
As I did not know off the top of my head the name of the inventor of Red Hat Linux, I guessed wrong as to who this gentleman was.
That’d be Mark Ewing, and he created the distro. Bob Young partnered with him and founded Red Hat. Linus Tordvals created Linux. Hit me with the pendant stick.
This is the kind of joke dozens of us can appreciate.
If he truly cared about his money going to appropriate causes, there are other voting choices he could have made wherein his wealth would be taxed fairly.
Performative charity has to be the most annoying kind.
Performative charity is still charity at the end of the day.
When you’re undermining the systems that could negate the need for the charity in the first place, by making deals on the back end and voting for choices that allow you to hoard wealth, it’s at best a wash.
At worst? It’s performative charity to polish your image so you can continue to undermine things for your own personal gain.
Seems like a bit of a stretch to assume all of that.
Funny, despite endless growth, they never seem to accomplish that goal.
His own personal gain in this case being… more charity?
He paid over 2 milly to sit down with a fella in Mar A Lago, so pardon me if I don’t believe his motives to altruistic.
He also tried running for congress this year afterwards. This man is 87….
Oh man, he’ll fit right in.
No, you are right to be skeptical of this man. He seems to be an enigma wrapped in an oxymoron. Or maybe just a moron.
To quote Doctor Kelso:
“He’s a bastard coated bastard, with bastard filling.”
He’s just better at the PR game than most.
A spherical bastard. (A bastard no matter which way you look at him)
Something along the lines of-
-donate to charity to avoid taxes
-tax avoidance reduces public funds to fix things like public schools
-charity swoops in to “save” public things that are underfunded due to tax avoidance
-claim personal heroism for saving public things through charity that otherwise would have been fine if taxes had been paid
-steal underpants
-profit????
Bingo.
I think it’s worse than that: Even if Elon–richest man in the world– wanted to, he doesn’t have enough money to make a significant societal difference. If he gave away all his money (ha!), it would come out to $3,000/US resident. While that’s a lot, I think most of us got at least that much in COVID stimulus…didn’t exactly solve our problems.
Point is, even well-meaning billionaires can only make change at the margins. Only governments, funded by taxes, can make an actual societal difference.
It’s a stupid thing that’s been going on for centuries at this point. Politicalics won’t do anything to fix it. They can only make it worse. There were much better places for that money to go. That has a lot less administrative overhead. But at the same time it’s not a good idea to allow the the government to say this program your offering doesn’t actually qualify because it’s too fancy or something. That’s how you get imprisoned behind totalitarian curtain.
At the same time if I was an IRS agent I would he auditing every the 501 c3 I could. And trying to verify what they were doing. I knew a guy that was and did found widespread fraud and kept being promoted until another agency tapped him to be 2nd in charge. There have always been bad and questionable actors but it seems like there are more now.
Just look at most of the Charity thrift stores. Many aren’t doing anything with the money they make. And they are making lots of money because they figured out they could. People screwed on all sides by MBAs who were told by the stupidity of academia their only responsibility is to the shareholder. In charity everyone is a shareholder.
“Taxed fairly” = stolen by a government of ghouls to launder through a pipeline of NGOs to prop up assholes who hate freedom.
Man earns his fortune helping others retain their vision, and your instinct is to snatch it out of his hand because he votes wrong? Nah, fuck that commie bullshit. The correct response to being an unproductive wanker is not theft, it’s to do better.
You do not accumulate the kind of wealth that allows you to drop 40 million on a car, without screwing over people under you.
The LEAST he could do is actually pump a little of that money back into circulation.
Don’t trust the government? Take the old school rich dude route and build the library, or public pool, or community center yourself. Directly. Slap your name on it in Gold, and the public will love you.
Spoken like someone who has never run a business, and if they did would be bankrupt in a damn hurry. News flash: screwing over your employees is bad business, and virtually always costs you far more than you save. Build/invent a product that makes the world better, sell it for a reasonable cost, and amazingly you can make a ton of money without screwing anyone over! The contrary claim comes from miserable commies who lack the talent and brains to do otherwise.
It’s impossible to accumulate 5 billion worth of personal wealth ethically. But I wish you the best luck with your amazing entrepreneurial skills and manifest destiny attitude.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more hopeless statement. You better keep your luck, I think you’re gonna need it.
Fine. It’s not impossible; it’s the equivalent of winning a $10 million lottery jackpot 500 times.
Just keep trying, you’ll get there.
Most of us are seeing 20%+ of our earnings go to taxes. Interesting choice to defend a guy who almost certainly paid far, far less.
I think ppl ought like him ought to pay a higher percent, but we can debate that. It’s bonkers to argue they should be paying a lower percent than the rest of us. As Warren Buffet has pointed out, his secretary should not be paying more in taxes than he does.
Interesting choice to hork up the propaganda instead of looking at the data: the ultra-wealthy in this country average a federal tax rate of 33%, and over 45% including state and local taxes. I get that certain concresscritters who have never worked an honest job in their lives (and stopped ranting about millionaires once they managed to become on on their congressional salary) love to spout nonsense about the rich “paying their fair share”, but depending on how you define fair that would most likely involve cutting their taxes, not raising them. Still not good enough? Should we be matching international standards? Okay, the only country that can possibly claim to have a more progressive tax regime than the US is Canada- all of the “high tax” socialist states in Europe actually tax their wealthy citizens far less.
Oh, and that Warren Buffet line has been debunked many, many times by people who professionally study this stuff. Neglecting to include the 35% corporate tax already paid before he takes his dividends (taxed at 15%) for an effective rate of near 50% is either an uncharacteristic simple mistake from a man who made his fortunate avoiding simple mistakes, or a fantastic piece of propaganda.
What other kind of charity is there? Yuck. Can’t imagine doing the other kind. Kind of reminds me how big shots send money to Africa when there are counties that have similar living conditions right here in America.
it’s not so simple. anti-diarrheal meds can save a life for $0.37 in areas that have poor sanitation. Almost half a million children die in Africa from diarrhea each year that don’t have to. I’m not going to judge anyone who decides causes like that deserve funding.
I never thought I’d say that I miss when the ultra-wealthy built stuff for the public good. Getty, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. built parks, libraries, schools, universities and museums from scratch
That mostly happened after they had terrible PR from, you know, killing workers during strike breaking, running monopolies that crushed everyone else, and having people try to blow them up on occasion.
They might have been a little more philanthropic than current monopolists, but they made sure their names got plastered on everything before they died. Does that remind you of anyone.
isn’t it wild how successful it was? Who doesn’t love Carnegie Hall?! Meanwhile how many people know the guy who funded it was a ghoul of a human being?
To be complete your should enumerate the things that they did that didn’t fit into the ‘public good’ file.
I would have been the “jaded” journalist talking about guillotines, but hey, I was wrong. “Jaded” and “realistic” are increasingly synonymous, and it’s hard to see outside of that bubble.
Somehow I knew the red hat figured into this.
But at least his millions are going to mostly good causes.
Thanks for the eyeglasses and your service to your country, Sir.
I thought the red hat meant he was a fan of Linux.
Over 25 years ago the Linux faithful told me they would dethrone Microsoft Windows as the operating system of choice. I’m still waiting….
2026 is the year of the… oh nevermind…
And 15 years before that Unix was going to rule the world- heh, that worked out well.
I suppose it’s more divided than ever as a result of SteamOS and Linux gaming support. Sure, gamers are still only a minority, but they are vocal.
Nah… it seems like steamdecks are everywhere, but the last steam hardware survey still only has linux gaming at 4% (and MacOS down to 2.3%). It’s still super niche even with valve’s slick ecosystem (and I’m part of the 0.3% of Bazzite crowd).