RM Sotheby's, known for its precision sales execution, flubs a big sale—but that's not the big news from Monterey

This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

16 Going on 70

By now you’ve surely heard about the Porsche Type 64 sale that was meant to produce the highest price ever achieved for a Porsche-designed classic car but ended up making the well-run RM Sotheby’s auction house the butt of news reports on CNN, CNBC, Inside Edition, Bloomberg , the New York Times and dozens of other news outlets around the world.

As the video above shows, we’re posting it here because it has the clearest recording of the Dutch-born auctioneer’s voice as he calls out thirty, forty, fifty, sixty and seventy million dollar bids when he probably meant 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 million dollar bids. His pronunciation is clear enough even if alternating those round figures with bids of $500,000 implies he was thinking of bids in the teens.