The woman who sold the world’s most expensive dinosaur

At the helm of the gripping sales battle was Phyllis Kao, a spirited auctioneer who appeared to delight in the volley, helping to draw in millions of curious online spectators.

Around 10 a.m., Kao, a vice president of client strategy for Sotheby’s, started the bidding at $3 million with a cool lean on the podium.

“Emily draws blood first,” Kao says of an early bid of $3.8 million in a captivating video.

Wearing a gray Armani jacket, with her dark hair twisted up and pinned back in a pony tail, Kao supported herself on her forearm and steadied her gaze toward the bidders like an opponent challenging a rival. Seven bidders held phones to their ears, relaying offers for the bones from buyers around the world.

“At $6 million, thank you, Simon Shaw,” she says, with no qualms about calling on bidders by name, making them feel seen, and special. “At $6 million, nice way to start.”

But the alchemy is in her stance.

Kao shifts her weight casually from foot to foot, tipping her body forward and back. She bends toward the packed room with a gleam in her eye, almost flirting with the bidders. Then she rocks back to show that, maybe, actually, she doesn’t care about their bid at all. Aloof, she subtly feigns indifference.

“Honestly, it was like an auctioneer’s paradise,” Kao said in an interview. “There was tension. There was palpable excitement.”

Auction houses, once known as a closed-door world, are now streamed to millions of viewers worldwide. When the art world transitioned online during the pandemic, Sotheby’s did too, finding a new audience on TikTok.

“Before COVID, you’d never see televised auctions,” said Karina Sokolovsky, the chief communications officer for Sotheby’s.

Art auctions now play as voyeuristic entertainment. And the stegosaurus, named Apex for its exceptional quality, was no exception. More than 2 million people viewed the video on TikTok. Kao, who joined Sotheby’s in 2016, said that she woke up Thursday to an “alarming” number of Instagram messages in response to the auction.

This was also no ordinary fossil. The largest of its kind ever found, Apex was projected to sell for $4 million to $6 million. The dinosaur sold for more than 10 times that estimate to Kenneth Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire, according to reports.

Kao, who has been an auctioneer for more than a decade, got her start right out of college as a temporary worker at a small auction house in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she grew up. But in her teenage years, she aspired to be a classical violinist. “I really carry that kind of performance mindset when I stand in front of a crowd,” she said.

When Kao first started taking sales at Sotheby’s in 2016, she had a mock audition. She wore her hair down and the head of auctioneers emeritus, Brad Bentoff, had a note for her: Put your hair up. When she pushed her hair away from her face it was distracting and hit the clipped microphone, he said. From then on, an updo became her signature auction look.

Sales executives “always want to make sure that I’m going to do my hair,” said Kao, who also prepares for morning auctions with meditation and vocal warm-ups.

As the bids for the bones crawl upward, topping one another by the millions, she appears giddy in the video.

“$13 million,” Kao says, as the numbers climb. She pauses to lean over the podium, propped up by her left elbow. “I’ll give you some time.” The bidders laugh in response. She returns to stand upright, amused, and continues, “Give it a think.”

Her jabs prod the bidders, egging them on: “Would you like to try a smaller bite?”; “Fashionably late, Jodi.”

By noon, the sale had topped the previous record set for a fossil sold at auction, a Tyrannosaurus rex named “Stan,” for $31.8 million in 2020.

“The winning bidder making a very late entrance was dramatic,” Kao said. “And that’s not common, for someone to wait for so long.”

Kao, wearing her grandfather’s rings for good luck, closed the deal with a thump of her gavel, a special one — Bentoff’s, her mentor, inscribed with a ‘B’ — that she uses for high-pressure auctions.

“It is a historical and important moment, and an important specimen,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I do want to always be entertaining.”