Walter White's Tighty-Whities From Breaking Bad Sold For A Ridiculous Amount

It's been a rough couple of years, economically speaking, and we've all half-jokingly talked about selling our used underwear on the internet. The problem, of course, is supply and demand — there's simply too much used underwear out there already, and no matter how special we think we are, there's nothing to set your boxers apart from, say, the ones being sold by that neighbor who keeps undercutting your pricing structure to run you out of business.

Then again, you (statistically speaking, probably) are not Bryan Cranston, the seemingly unstoppable Hollywood juggernaut whose surprise transition into dramatic acting in the late 2000s had a whole generation of AMC viewers glued to their futons for five consecutive seasons. Anyone who watched the first episode of "Breaking Bad" will remember that Cranston's Walter White, the mild-mannered high school teacher with a stressful night job, started out the series with an iconic look: a dress shirt, a pair of glasses, boots with socks, and a pair of his finest going out tighty-whities.

Now, thanks to a collector's market that would be best not to think about too much, those underpants have sold at auction. They cost, um, a lot. "Too much" is subjective, but empirically, for a pair of briefs that a middle-aged man wore in the New Mexico desert, they ... cost a lot.

The underpants in question, sold and authenticated by PropStore, went for a mind-boggling $32,500 on Monday, February 27, 2023, making them — by Action Network's estimates — the most expensive underwear ever sold, surpassing even Queen Victoria's drawers in value. Nobody tell Albert.

Wildly, the listing for the white briefs, which describes them as "cotton and polyester" and having "a white elastic waistband with blue and goldenrod details, though the elasticity is largely lost," also states that these particular unmentionables were "a set decoration 'closet' pair of White's underwear." The implication certainly seems to be that the underpants were never worn by Bryan Cranston in the series, begging the questions "would they be worth more or less if they'd actually had the Oscar-nominated actor's bottom in them?" and "how much more would they have sold for if the elasticity wasn't largely lost?"

Hypotheticals aside, this much can be said with some certainty: Somewhere, right this minute, a guy is explaining to his soon-to-be-ex-partner why the price of a Lexus is missing from their joint checking account, and why, when you think about it, this really was the best investment that he could have made after five or six beers.