Meet the charming Czech prince betting big on NFTs: William Rudolf Lobkowicz is on a mission to restore his royal family’s ancestral castle and art collection
- The 500-year-old Lobkowicz art collection survived Nazis and communists, now, the tech-savvy royal is turning to NFTs to preserve the family’s legacy
- The Harvard graduate made the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list, but still takes trams to work, and worked his way up by selling ice cream and giving castle tours
In his case, “the other” Prince William has joined the blockchain phenomenon and auctioned a slew of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in hopes that they will help support the upkeep of the family’s artwork collection and ancestral castle.
My father sometimes says we are the richest poor people in the world
My father sometimes says we are the richest poor people in the world
If that made your ears perk up like ours, here’s what else we know about this tech-savvy 27-year-old royal.
He was raised at home in the Czech Republic
Born in 1994, William Rudolf Lobkowicz is the eldest child of an American mum and Czech dad. His father William E. Lobkowicz hails from a 600-year-old Bohemian noble family that once sponsored Ludwig van Beethoven.
The House of Lobkowicz lost its castles and artworks – including 16th and 17th century paintings from Pieter Bruegel and Diego Velázquez – to the Nazis and communists and only reclaimed them in the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR.
Since then, Lobkowicz’s family has returned from exile to the Czech Republic, where he has grown up and taken a role in the family estate.