Logan Paul Sells Controversial Pokémon card For $16.5M

YouTube star Logan Paul has set a new Guinness World Record, selling his rare Pokémon card for nearly $16.5 million on Monday — the most expensive card sale in history — though the new record sale didn’t come without controversy.

The auction for the Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card — one of 39 created in a competition in the 1990s — was won by AJ Scaramucci, the son of American financier Anthony Scaramucci, outbidding several others who made offers in the seven- and eight-figure range.

Paul is believed to have made an $8 million profit after auction fees on Monday. He bought the card for $5.3 million in July 2021.

.@LoganPaul‘s rare @Pokemon card becomes most expensive ever sold in record-setting auction.

The PSA-10 Pikachu Illustrator went on sale via @GoldinCo and eventually sold for $16,492,000.https://t.co/B1YBUIqhbx

— Guinness World Records (@GWR) February 16, 2026

However, the record sale reignited criticism over Paul’s move to fractionalize ownership of the card on Liquid Marketplace in 2022 before the platform went offline, leaving investors scrambling for returns and prompting a lawsuit in Canada.

In a post to X on Monday, Delphi Labs general counsel Gabriel Shapiro said Paul’s “Pikachu NFT fractionalization fiasco” is a “classic case of ‘slop tokenization.’”

“The token is basically just ‘juxtaposed’ with property but has no rights to it,” Shapiro said, urging investors to read the terms of service and to stop rushing into “legal scams.”

Paul addressed the criticism, stating that Liquid Marketplace went offline for reasons beyond his control and that, once aware of the issue, he paid to restore the site so users could withdraw their funds.