David Gilmour’s Guitar Sells for a Record-Breaking $14.5 Million

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour’s Fender Stratocaster, known as the Black Strat, sold at auction for $14,550,000 million last week, setting a new record for the most expensive guitar ever sold.

Gilmour owned the guitar from 1970 until 2019, when he auctioned it off with over 120 other instruments in his personal collection to raise money for ClientEarth. He played the Strat on every Pink Floyd recording made between 1970 and 1983, including some of the band’s most famous albums, like The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall. The guitar originally had a sunburst finish but was painted black. Although it originally had a maple neck, that was later swapped for rosewood.

“These guitars have been very good to me,” Gilmour told Rolling Stone at the time of the auction. “They’re my friends. They have given me lots of music. I just think it’s time that they went off and served someone else.”

The Black Strat fetched significantly more than the $2 million to $4 million originally expected. After a 21-minute bidding war, the guitar sold to an online bidder, whose identity is currently unknown. The auction was held by Christie’s in New York and featured the extensive guitar collection of Indianapolis Colts owner and CEO Jim Irsay, who died in 2025 and originally bought the Black Strat for $3,975,000 in the 2019 auction. Irsay’s collection was considered to be the most valuable private guitar collection in the world, and the auction brought in a total of over $84 million with 44 items sold. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to charities Irsay supported.

Other guitars in the auction also sold for a substantial amount of money, including Jerry Garcia’s custom-made “Tiger” guitar, which he played almost exclusively between 1979 and 1989. Irsay originally bought it for $957,500, and it sold for $11.5 million. Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang sold for $6.9 million.

The sale beat a record previously held by the Martin D-18E acoustic guitar Kurt Cobain played on MTV Unplugged just months before his death in 1994, which sold for $6 million in 2020.