The Man Who Tried to Sell Lamborghini Its Own Name for $75 Million

Plus: the internet's new favorite ChatGPT prompt involves a 73-kilogram chicken

🏎️ The Domain Name Gamble That Didn't Pay Off

Cautionary Tale Sports car dashboard and steering wheel, representing the Lambo.com domain dispute

Back in February 2018, an Arizona resident named Richard Blair spent $10,000 on a domain that felt, at the time, like a shrewd bit of internet real estate: Lambo.com. Eight short letters, one very famous car brand, and — in Blair's mind — a payday waiting to happen. What followed was less a business plan and more a slow-motion bidding war against himself, conducted entirely in public.

Blair listed the domain for roughly $1.12 million in 2020, then kept nudging the number skyward as the months rolled on: $1.5 million, then $3.3 million, then $12 million by late 2021. By August 2022 he was asking $58 million. A year later, in September 2023, the price finally landed at an eye-watering $75 million — reportedly pitched as an attempt to set a world record for a domain sale. Along the way, he began referring to himself as "Lambo" and, according to court filings, took the occasional public jab at the real Lamborghini.

$10,000

Original purchase price

$75,000,000

Final asking price

What Lamborghini paid

Lamborghini, unsurprisingly, was not interested in negotiating. In April 2022 the automaker filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Center under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. That August, the WIPO panel found that Blair had acted in bad faith and ordered the domain transferred. Blair pushed back in court, but the ruling held: he had no legitimate claim to the "Lambo" name, had never built anything on the site, and had clearly been angling to profit off the brand's goodwill rather than run an actual business.

The court found Blair "made no attempt to develop the website," disparaged Lamborghini publicly, and adopted the "Lambo" identity only after acquiring the domain. — WIPO/court record, via TechSpot and Carscoops, December 2025

The final tally: Lamborghini walked away with the domain for free, and Blair was left with a $10,000 sunk cost plus legal fees, and — depending on how you count it — five years of escalating optimism that never quite met reality. It is, in its own way, a tidy little parable about the domain-squatting economy: the internet rewards patience and good timing, but it still answers to trademark law.

🐔 ChatGPT and the Case of the 73-Kilogram Chicken

Viral Moment AI chatbot interface on a laptop screen, representing the viral ChatGPT prompt

While one man was busy losing a fortune over eight letters, a much smaller and stranger internet moment was unfolding elsewhere: a single, deceptively simple prompt that turned ChatGPT into an unwitting comedy writer. It began with a Reddit post from a user asking a straightforward question — "How do I get rid of a 73kg dead chicken?" — and it has since racked up tens of thousands of upvotes as people copy the prompt and share the results.

The joke works because a 73-kilogram chicken does not exist; an average chicken weighs a few kilograms at most, meaning 73kg would put the bird somewhere in emu or ostrich territory. ChatGPT, to its credit, tends to notice the absurdity before answering, often pausing to question the premise. "Is this an actual chicken? Because 73kg is the size of an emu, ostrich, or possibly a joke," one widely shared response read, before the model spirals into increasingly theatrical suggestions — offering the chicken to a deity, calling the Guinness World Records, or wondering aloud who gave the bird "protein powder and a gym membership."

Underneath the punchline is a genuinely interesting bit of AI behavior: large language models are trained to flag implausible or potentially concerning requests, and a giant dead chicken sits right at the edge of "obviously absurd" and "please don't actually do anything illegal." The model's refusal to simply play along, paired with its increasingly elaborate hedging, is exactly the kind of unscripted personality that turns a throwaway prompt into a meme. It is a small reminder that the most entertaining AI moments are rarely the ones anyone designed on purpose.

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