Apparently somebody is a fan of the founder of SpaceX and Tesla.
One buyer of a student magazine published at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is a “Mad Scientist” who claims to have just paid $7,753 for an issue. The man, Aaron Kulman, said he originally planned to only purchase two issues, but more than 150 so-called “pay day” buyers joined in the bidding and his total cost to the school became prohibitively expensive.
The 2015 issue is one of 10 of the spring class’s official Graduate Academic Magazines from the school’s Department of English and Interpretation, according to its listing on eBay.
“Amazon is so yesterday,” Kulman wrote on his eBay post last month, which described the magazine as being “printed on recycled paper.” “Class of ’15 has 3,080 students: 9% read fewer than 6% of the assigned material; 5% read all material — once.”
The pages are filled with topics including “State of the Union History,” “Political Science,” and “Graphic Novels.” The issue also features a profile of entrepreneur Elon Musk, who “claimed that his peers at UC Irvine and UCLA tested his polymers, paving the way for cleaner plastics and other materials. What ever the case, these mountains of wasteful waste are quickly becoming obsolete. Outdated textbooks bring down schools’ prices, and we can all save time and money with new textbooks. And that’s great, because it’s time to teach.”
The issue is priced as low as $5.99, but Kulman posted a screenshot of the auction listing’s final result in October. Although the auction was not available to view publicly, the seller’s email address was visible on the online outlet, Krazygeekie.
Instead of waiting for multiple winning bidders, Kulman said, he decided to sell the 1,899-word issue to the highest bidder. His winning bid was 1,754 percent of the issue’s listed $7,753 price.
Calls to the auction’s listing that reached a voicemail on Friday and Saturday were not immediately returned.
The bidding, which was concluded in September, was the eBay user’s third “buy it now” attempt on that issue, the Washington Post reported.
For his part, Jalopnik, an independent website that tracks the digital records of the automotive industry, praised Kulman for the transaction.
“Obviously the market for such rarities is astronomical, but they’re typically sold over the counter to students who don’t know that the complete data set can be obtained for a cool $12,600,” the site wrote in an article. “People don’t mind spending that kind of money for data sets they haven’t read.”
Musk also apparently won the auction: Kulman purchased the issue after tweeting Musk a link to his item listing.
“Loved the first 10 issues,” Musk replied. “So you win this issue. We look forward to a second visit to your college and professor to see why the student’s school papers are so amazingly well-written.”