A Michael Jordan jersey that's been hiding in plain sight for decades might be worth $20 million. Joe Jonas got a Pokemon tattoo. And a $7.99 One Piece Popeyes meal got resold for $400.

This week:

🌟 The celebrities secretly (and not so secretly) obsessed with trading cards
🏀 A lost Michael Jordan jersey just turned up in the last place you'd expect
🤯 A bento box, a Pope hat, and a 35-year-old flag card walk into a bar
🦕 The guy who spent $16.5M on a Pokemon card is now hunting dinosaur fossils
🔥 Heatseekers: Top upcoming releases

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Trading cards aren't just for hobbyists anymore. Some of the biggest names in music, sports, and entertainment are deep in the hobby, and their involvement is helping push collectibles further into mainstream culture. Here's a look at who's collecting what.

Logan Paul is the obvious headliner. He sold his PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator for $16.5 million earlier this year, setting the Guinness World Record for the most expensive trading card ever sold. His journey from YouTube unboxings to record-breaking auctions basically tracks the entire trajectory of the modern Pokemon market. (He’s also apparently been getting into One Piece recently too.)

Steve Aoki has been one of the hobby's most consistent champions. The DJ and producer has a 35,000-card collection stored with PSA Vault and opens packs on stream sometimes. He's also pulling in unlikely collectors: in March, Kim Kardashian was spotted opening Pokemon packs with Aoki at a local card shop. She and her son Saint browsed a $100,000 black diamond Pokemon card before settling on a BGS 10 Hidden Fates Shiny Charizard for $1,300. Sometimes the hobby meets you where you are.

Justin Bieber owns an expansive collection including framed first-generation sets and multiple professionally graded rarities. Post Malone went a step further: he has an official Pokemon promo card of himself (a P25 Music promo, Colorless-type Basic V) that was created by The Pokemon Company and given to him personally. It was never publicly released. He also famously bought the One Ring MTG card for $2.6M.

And then there's Joe Jonas, who might have the most committed flex of anyone on this list. Jonas recently got a Bubble Mew Pokemon tattoo on his forearm. Not a card. Not a slab. A permanent tribute to one of the most iconic cards in the hobby, inked on his body. That's commitment.

The celebrity effect on collectibles is real. When Logan Paul sells a card for $16.5 million, it makes finance headlines... But when Joe Jonas tattoos a Mew on his arm, it signals that cards are become a genuine part of pop culture identity 👀

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Michael Russo, creator of The Michael Jordan Archive, just photo-matched a jersey that's been sitting in a display at the Cape Fear Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, Jordan's hometown, for years. Nobody realized what it was.

It's the jersey Michael Jordan wore during the 1982 NCAA National Championship game, the one where he hit the game-winning shot against Georgetown as a freshman. That shot. The one that launched everything.

Russo estimates the jersey is worth at least $20 million, which would place it among the most valuable pieces of sports memorabilia in existence.

The fact that it was just sitting there, in a museum display case in his hometown, unidentified for decades, is wild. Not every great find comes from an auction house. Sometimes it's been right in front of everyone the whole time.

Three stories this week that prove the collectibles world has absolutely no rules.

On April 13, Popeyes launched its first-ever anime collaboration with Toei Animation: a One Piece "Luffy Bento Box" meal for $7.99. The first 200 customers at six select locations received a collectible wooden bento box. Within hours, those boxes were on eBay for $150 to $550, with one listing hitting $1,000. Drive-through wait times stretched to two hours, and many stores sold out within the first ten minutes. For a chicken and mac & cheese meal.

When Pope Leo XIV was announced as the first American-born Pope and a confirmed White Sox fan, the team saw an opportunity. They created a Pope miter hat with the White Sox sock logo and offered it as part of a limited "Pews at the Ballpark" specialty ticket package. Then demand got out of hand. The team expanded it to a ballpark-wide giveaway for the August 11 game against the Reds, with the front office saying "the fans have spoken" and that "the White Sox Pope Hat is one we believe all fans should have the opportunity to take home."

And in one of the stranger experiments in hobby history, a collector named Joe at StakX organized a social experiment on X/Twitter to collectively buy up every available copy of the 1991 Score American Flag card (#737), a 35-year-old junk wax era card that nobody wanted. The card jumped from $4 to $14. Available listings dropped from 210 to 83. And then the effort pivoted to raise money for Sigs4Soldiers, a military support organization. A $4 card became a community moment…

Graded versions card are now being sold for between $50-190.

Our takeaway is that collectibility can come from anywhere, at any time, for any reason 😂

The world of collectibles is wide and deep, and there’s a constant stream of new releases. Here are some of the big ones that are coming up:

Collectibles used to be about the objects. Increasingly, they're about what those objects say about who we are, what we care about, and what communities we belong to. A Pope hat says "I'm a South Side kid." A Bubble Mew tattoo says "this hobby is part of me." A $16.5 million Pikachu says... well, that says a lot of things.

The point is: the hobby keeps getting more personal. And that's what makes it interesting.

See you next week!