Bruce Pascal is a commercial real estate agent living here on the East Coast, and he’s the focus of a new Barcroft TV special showcasing his extreme collection of Hot Wheels toy cars worth an estimated $1,000,000, with one of those toy cars worth $150,000 on its own.
As someone who owned Hot Wheels toy cars growing up but never really gave them much thought other than they were cool to look at and play with on a track occasionally, I cannot begin to wrap my mind around someone caring so deeply about these trinkets that he’s amassed a collection worth one million dollars. But Bruce Pascal has done exactly that, and his collection is incredible.
According to the YouTube description, Bruce Pascal owns roughly 3500 of the Hot Wheels miniature toy cars. Amongst his prized collection are 175 unique Hot Wheels prototypes, toys that were never released to the public and therefore are extremely valuable. But the crowned jewel of Bruce Pascal’s collection is his bright pink VW Beach Bomb Rear-Loader, a toy car which is worth an estimated $150,000.
One thing about collections like this is you really need to take the overall valuation with a grain of salt. Collectors think of the cumulative value of their collections by adding up the individual value of every single item, which ultimately yields the highest possible valuation number. But if they were to ever try and profit off of these collections two things would happen: 1) they sell off everything piece by piece and not all of the items sell while others don’t fetch the expected value and 2) they try to sell the collection as a whole and they get less than half of what they think the collection is worth. So while this collection might be valued at $1 million I can’t envision a scenario where it would ever fetch that much even when it was dismantled.
[h/t TheDailyWant]