The 10 Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold
AI.com went for 70 million dollars. Every name in the top ten is a .com, most are a single dictionary word, and half sold in the last four years. Here is the list, what is missing from it, and the pattern underneath.
September 9, 20266 min readDomain sales · Aftermarket · Valuation
Domain sales make headlines because the numbers look absurd. Someone paid eight figures for a word.
The numbers are real, but the list is messier than most articles admit. Many famous "domain sales" were really company acquisitions with a domain attached. Many more were never disclosed at all. What follows is the top ten by publicly reported sale price, followed by the more useful part: what the list has in common, and what it is missing.
The top ten
| # | Domain | Price | Year | Buyer | Seller |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI.com | 70,000,000 | 2025 | Kris Marszalek | Arsyan Ismail |
| 2 | Voice.com | 30,000,000 | 2019 | Block.one | MicroStrategy |
| 3 | 360.com | 17,000,000 | 2015 | 360 Security Technology | Vodafone |
| 4 | Chat.com | 15,500,000 | 2023 | Dharmesh Shah | Not disclosed |
| 5 | NFTs.com | 15,000,000 | 2022 | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| 6 | Rocket.com | 14,000,000 | 2024 | Rocket Companies | L3Harris |
| 7 | Sex.com | 13,000,000 | 2010 | Clover Holdings | Escom |
| 8 | Icon.com | 12,000,000 | 2025 | Icon | Not disclosed |
| 9 | Tesla.com | 11,000,000 | 2014 | Tesla | Stuart Grossman |
| 10 | Hotels.com | 11,000,000 | 2001 | Hotels.com | Not disclosed |
Just outside: Connect.com at 10 million to HubSpot in 2022, Porno.com at 8,888,888 in 2015, and Gold.com and FB.com at 8.5 million each. FB.com is a good story on its own, sold to Facebook in 2010 by the American Farm Bureau Federation, which announced the price at its annual meeting.
Four things the list tells you immediately
Every single one is a .com. Not one entry in the top ten is anything else. Extend the list well past fifty sales and you find a single exception, Sex.xxx at 3 million. Whatever you believe about new extensions, the aftermarket has voted with eight and nine figures, and it voted for .com.
They are almost all one dictionary word. AI, Voice, Chat, Rocket, Sex, Icon, Hotels. Not clever coinages, not two words joined, not anything requiring explanation. The most valuable domain is the word for the thing itself.
The market is accelerating. Seven of the top ten sold in 2014 or later. Four sold in 2022 or later. Two of them, AI.com and Icon.com, sold in 2025. This is not a market that peaked during the dot-com boom and faded.
The buyer is usually buying a category, not a name. Rocket Companies did not want a nice word. It wanted to be the rocket company. Block.one bought Voice.com while launching a product called Voice. The price is not for the letters, it is for ending the argument about who owns the category.
Why AI.com went for 70 million
The AI.com sale in 2025 more than doubled the previous record, and it fits the pattern rather than breaking it.
A two-letter .com is already scarce. There are only 676 of them and essentially none trade. Attach those two letters to the defining technology category of the decade, and you have a domain that a very large number of extremely well funded companies would all like to own. Kris Marszalek, chief executive of Crypto.com, bought it from Arsyan Ismail.
It is worth noticing that the buyer already ran a company built on a category-word .com. Crypto.com was itself reportedly an eight-figure acquisition. That is not a coincidence. The people who pay these prices are the people who have already seen the return.
The famous names that are not on the list
This is where most articles quietly mislead.
x.com is probably the most talked-about domain in the world and it does not appear on any credible list of expensive sales. Elon Musk founded X.com in 1999, it became PayPal, and he bought the domain back years later. The price was never disclosed. A single-letter .com attached to a company that renamed itself around it is plausibly worth more than anything on this list, but there is no public number, so it cannot be ranked. Anyone quoting you a figure for x.com is guessing.
CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and VacationRentals.com are frequently listed at 49.7, 35.6 and 35 million respectively, which would put all three above Voice.com. They are missing here for a good reason: those figures come from company and asset acquisitions where a domain was one component of a larger purchase. That is a different transaction from someone buying a domain. Lists that mix the two produce a ranking where the top entries are not really domain sales at all.
Google.com, Facebook.com and Amazon.com were registered, not bought. The most valuable domains on the internet mostly cost their owners a registration fee, because they got there first. That is the single most important fact on this page.
Nominal price hides the real ranking
The table above ranks by the number on the cheque. Adjust for inflation and it reorders.
Hotels.com at 11 million in 2001 is worth substantially more in today's money than Tesla.com at 11 million in 2014, and both look different again against a 2025 sale. Sex.com at 13 million in 2010 was a far larger transaction in real terms than its rank suggests.
If you are trying to judge whether the market is getting hotter, nominal figures overstate the recent boom. If you are trying to judge what a name might cost you today, nominal is the number that matters.
Most sales are invisible
The largest caveat on any list like this is selection. Public figures exist because someone chose to disclose them, and there are strong reasons not to.
Buyers who disclose invite every other domain holder to raise their asking price. Sellers under a non-disclosure agreement cannot say anything. Deals settled in equity rather than cash have no clean number. Chat.com is a neat illustration: the 15.5 million purchase is public, and the subsequent sale to OpenAI, including equity, is not.
So treat these as the reported floor of a much larger market, not a census of it.
What this means if you are naming something
You are not buying a category word for eight figures. The useful lessons are the cheap ones.
Short and literal wins. Every name on this list is something you could say once on a phone call and have the other person spell correctly. If your candidate needs spelling out, it is worth less than you think.
.com still commands the premium. The aftermarket is unambiguous on this. That does not mean you must have the .com, and plenty of good businesses run on other extensions, but it does mean the .com is what appreciates.
The category word is usually gone. This is normal and not a problem. The alternative is a coined name that becomes the category word through use, which is what Tesla, Google and Uber all did. Coined names are also far cheaper to register and much easier to trademark.
Getting there first beats paying later. Every domain on this list was once available for the standard registration fee.
If you have a concept rather than a word, the name generator works from meaning outward and checks availability as it goes. If you already have candidates, check them across extensions at once before you get attached to one.
And when a name you want is taken, it is worth learning what the public record can tell you about the holder before assuming it is unavailable. Plenty of registered domains are quietly for sale.
Sale figures are the publicly reported prices compiled from industry reporting. Undisclosed and equity-inclusive transactions are excluded, which is why several widely cited names do not appear.
Put the research to work.
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