The hottest gift you can give a tech bro isn’t something new — it’s something old

An adage says brides should have something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue on their wedding day.

But when it comes to tech bros and the types of gifts they like to give and receive, it’s all about the “something old.”

Tech workers are some of the highest earners in the US. B-17 reported in March that a Dice study found tech employees made an average annual salary of $111,193 in 2023 — nearly double the amount the average full-time US worker makes, according to salary data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what do you get the tech bro in your life who can buy themselves any of the status symbols men are obsessed with nowadays without draining their bank accounts?

Lupe Puerta spent over a decade working in VIP client relations and personal shopping at Net-a-Porter.

Lupe Puerta, the former global head of personal shopping at Net-a-Porter, said the answer was history.

Puerta, who joined Net-a-Porter in 2004 and left in 2019 to launch a personal-shopping platform, The Floorr, told B-17 that, from her experience, Silicon Valley types don’t follow fashion and lifestyle trends.

Tech bros want to own pieces of the past no one else can have

“I’m sure there are people that are like, ‘Look at my watch, and this is how much I’m worth,'” she said, “but I think beyond that, it’s buying and having access to something really special that has a lot of meaning.”

As recent examples over the years show, that usually translates to something old.

In 2019, during Reddit’s annual Secret Santa gift exchange, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave away an array of collectible items and a manuscript copy of “The Great Gatsby,” which features notes handwritten by F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was writing the 1925 bestseller.

The following year, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chair, reportedly bought himself a 1964 Ed Ruscha painting in a Christie’s auction for $52.5 million.

A year after that, the tech billionaire Larry Ellison loaned two Vincent van Gogh paintings he personally owns to an exhibition on the artist — a priceless gift to the art world.

And take a more recent example: the opinion-dividing 7-foot Roman-inspired statue Mark Zuckerberg gifted his wife, Priscilla Chan, in August.

It may not be old, but as Zuckerberg indicated in the caption of his Instagram post, the gift was intended to symbolize an ancient Roman tradition of gifting wives statues of themselves.

“Imagine the amount of money that must have cost,” Puerta said. “It’s like buying a museum piece.”

Puerta added that the gift proved that these high-earners feel a certain “thrill of owning” or gifting someone something that doesn’t exist in most modern designer stores.

Representatives for Zuckerberg, Gates, and Ellison did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tech bros want to own a piece of history

From Puerta’s experience, tech bros tend to gravitate to collectibles, “everything from alcohol to cars” and things like watches worn by historical figures, such as former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It’s like “buying history,” she said.

Puerta said she noticed that male clients love Oktaaf, a popular European brand. Started by a Spanish jeweler and a Belgian entrepreneur, the brand buys archaeological pieces from Egypt and creates jewelry around the ancient finds.

As of September, one of the most expensive pieces listed on the company’s website was a $6,500 bracelet made from a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian artifact brushed with an 18-karat gold finish.

“It’s incredible,” Puerta said, adding that most of Oktaaf’s “clients are men.”

So if you have a tech bro in your life, don’t say I didn’t warn you about what they might have on their holiday gift lists.