Readers of this magazine will already be aware that, in the phantasmagorical parallel universe of the super-prime property industry in Miami and Dubai, there’s a bandwagon on the loose. It’s no longer enough to erect vast trophy dwellings with the promise of spectacular lifestyles and even wilder returns. To really stoke the promise of exclusivity and opulence (or rather, to break through the triple-glazed ennui of buyers offered infinity pools, concierges and lavish amenities wherever they lay their cheque book), developers are mixing in the imprimatur of olde worlde luxury brands, with all the synergistic cachet, dynamic design inspo and unique perks they denote.
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It’s more like picking a football team to support than buying a home: would you prefer to throw your multi-million-dollar lot in with a Bentley Residence, an Armani Casa, a Bulgari Lighthouse or a Fendi Château? Each, of course, makes a statement about the proclivities and passions of the buyer who signs up. But one of these developments seems set to stand head, shoulders and massive architectural tiara above all the rest.
I’m talking about the Burj Binghatti Jacob & Co Residences, opening in Dubai’s Business Bay in 2026. Standing 595m high, it will be the world’s tallest and blingiest residential tower, crowned with a cluster of jagged, cloud-scraping spires formed from illuminated, diamond-form structures. The only thing missing so far is the Eye of Sauron shining out among them… but the tower’s namesake, Jacob Arabo, has been known to realise concepts ranging from the unlikely to the damn near unthinkable, his own life story being the prime example. So don’t write it off.
The rise of Jacob Arabo
Olde worlde luxury Jacob is not. Rather, he is the grand panjandrum of new money. Once known simply as ‘Jacob the Jeweler’ to the New York rappers who championed his brand of ultra-bling back in the Nineties, Arabo, via his Jacob & Co marque, has become arguably the world’s pre-eminent purveyor of unapologetic, full-fat, spectacularly bejewelled, superdeluxe kitsch.
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And while the brand’s over-the-top jewellery is these days ubiquitous on the 0.01 per cent circuit, it’s in high-complexity watch-making that Arabo has reached an apogee of creative excess. This is what has allowed his New York diamond district hustle to make what would have once seemed like an unlikely transfer to the heights of a Dubai hyper-tower.
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It’s been quite the rise for a Jewish émigré from Tashkent in Soviet Uzbekistan, who arrived in the States as a teenager in 1979 with a serious work ethic, a latent talent for jewellery design and little else. At 16 he completed a six-month jewellery course in four months; at 17 he was supplementing his income from a jewellery factory by making his own pieces in his bedroom; and by 18 he’d bought his own factory.
Eventually he established a small booth in the cut-throat milieu of Manhattan’s 47th Street diamond quarter. On-the-rise hip hop players such as Biz Markie, Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z soon came knocking, and as the fashion for ‘icing’ everything – from vast necklaces to teeth and Rolexes – emerged, Jacob was at the heart of it, with bigger creations, more diamonds and more outlandish ideas than anyone else.
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His initial watch back then – a battery-powered number in bold primary colours and with four separate subdials, each for a different time zone – was eye-catching (David Beckham was a fan). But it was once he set his sights on Swiss-made haute horlogerie that Jacob hit a different level altogether.
If you look up the brand’s Instagram page, you’ll see him reeling off pitch-perfect, freehand sketches of his complex designs. Jeweller that Jacob is, though, it’s his instinctive three-dimensional thinking that has driven his horological inventiveness, with watches that are massive, multi-layered objets in which timekeeping is a mere part of the overall performance. And they really are a performance.
Watch him work
For instance, there’s the orrery-inspired Astronomia series, which, with cases that resemble upturned glass salad bowls, feature rotating arrangements of dials, multi-axis tourbillons, painted globes and bejewelled, faceted ‘planets’. These elements are all on the move, orbiting a central axis on extended arms that also turn horizontally as they spin. Some versions – and there are many – add in elaborate microsculptures, kaleidoscopic jewels or spinning carousels conveying planets in the opposite direction.
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Want to go the mega-jewellery route, and have $20 million going spare? Jacob has you covered for that, with the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin Billionaire series of watches – skeleton tourbillon timepieces embedded in a massive, completely gem-set bracelet. The ‘Timeless Treasure’ version has 482 fancy yellow diamonds – almost 900 carats; even the skeleton bridges are diamond-set.
Or if you’re a speed nut, you could go for the hulking Twin Turbo Furious, packing in a pair of side-by-side triple-axis tourbillons, a decimal minute repeater (it chimes the hours, tenths of hours and minutes), and a monopusher chronograph with a ‘pitboard indicator’ invention, which allows you to compare five consecutive lap times. Because why not?
You can apply that same rhetorical enquiry to the Opera Godfather, which houses a pair of teeny music box cylinders whose rotations pluck out the theme of The Godfather movie. Once again, each element of the dial – the cylinders, a timekeeping subdial, a tri-axial tourbillon and a grand piano microsculpture – is in constant rotation around the central axis, where there’s a tiny figurine of Don Corleone. Classy, eh?
The Godfather is, mais bien sûr, Jacob’s favourite movie. When he launched a special version of the watch to mark the film’s 50th anniversary in 2022, he did so with a glitzy, Cosa Nostra-themed gathering in Sicily. You and I may feel queasy about that (after all, the Mafia is hardly ancient history on the island); but queasiness, you’ll understand by now, is not one of Jacob Arabo’s gears. Had it been, he might have avoided getting into trouble in 2006, when he was arrested in Detroit by federal authorities on charges of laundering $270 million of drug money for an organised crime organisation known as the Black Mafia Family.
Having struck a deal with federal prosecutors, in 2008 Jacob pleaded guilty to lesser charges of falsifying documents and giving false statements. He ended up doing 14 months’ porridge in a federal jail, and, it seems, using the time to plan, on the one hand, a jewellery line based around iced-out handcuffs, and on the other, his move into watchmaking. It was a good plan.
Jacob & Co’s Swiss subsidiary, dedicated to cracking fine watchmaking, was set up in 2007 in the midst of his legal battles. Sensibly, the brand resisted the temptation to get into in-house watchmaking, instead finding Swiss partners with the capabilities to construct its founder’s mind-blowing ideas (in particular Concepto, a firm that specialises in behind-the-scenes movements and complications for major brands).
For years, the watch cognoscenti looked askance at his gauche and gaudy concepts, but appreciation has been increasingly conferred – not least because, in the anything-goes, hype-friendly, TikTok-powered present, Jacob & Co’s shameless excess is nothing if not entertaining. A new generation of musicians, MMA fighters, rappers and influencers – plus, not inconsequentially, Cristiano Ronaldo – are firmly on board.
Legal woes
Not that Jacob Arabo’s legal troubles are over. In July he was named as a defendant in a highly disturbing lawsuit involving Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, the hip-hop mogul. The claimant, Adria English, accuses Combs of trafficking and grooming her, including coercing her into alleged non-consensual sex with Arabo at a Hamptons party in 2004. She is seeking unspecified damages from Combs, Arabo and others. Combs has denied the allegations, while Arabo has not responded to media enquiries about them.
Will that harm Jacob & Co’s empire building? Unlikely. Since 2022 Jacob’s son, Benjamin Arabov, has been at the helm of the company as CEO. Though Jacob remains the clear creative overlord, his 28-year-old son is a chip off the entrepreneurial block, having had a successful start-up and exit (in the education sector, of all places) under his belt. According to LuxeConsult, a watch industry research firm, watchmaking now accounts for 75 per cent of Jacob & Co’s revenue, with an acceleration of 132 per cent between 2020 and 2022.
In June, the brand’s latest partnership watch with kindred spirit Bugatti was announced. It’s inspired by the release of the carmaker’s hybrid replacement for the Chiron, the horologically named Bugatti Tourbillon. (The synergies continue, since Binghatti, developer of the Jacob & Co Residences, is also building a Bugatti property just up the road.)
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Like the new car, the Bugatti Tourbillon watch takes a pointy, streamlined form, with a dashboard-style arrangement at the top showing a fast-rotating tourbillon, a timekeeping dial and a power reserve indicator. For timekeeping, the hour and minutes hands are retrograde – meaning they move in an arc rather than a circle, jumping instantly back to the start as they complete the minute or hour.
But the showpiece is the unbelievable, engine-works automaton below these: a micromechanical marvel simulating the architecture and motion of the Tourbillon’s new V16 engine. Activated by a pusher, it runs for 20 seconds at a time, with a display of 16 tiny titanium pistons busily pumping in and out within see-through cylinders, which are milled from a single block of sapphire crystal. Driving them from the centre is a minutely machined crankshaft, while sculpted exhaust pipes feed away from the cylinders.
It’s crazy, crazy stuff: absurdly complicated, quite beautifully executed, as daft as a brush and swag of the purest, most unfiltered kind. Jacob & Co through and through, in other words.
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 93. Click here to subscribe.
