Someone Just Paid $1.79M for a Dead Fish

It's an annual thing in Japan: Who will spend the big bucks on the year's first auction of a huge bluefin tuna? In 2020, the honor goes to self-dubbed "sushi king" Kiyoshi Kimura, who ABC News reports paid $1.79 million for the 608-pound fish on Sunday. That works out to just shy of $3,000 a pound, and if you're trying to picture the heft of a fish that large, Bloomberg notes it weighs about the same as a big vending machine.

The purchase price is said to be the second-highest ever paid, with the record belonging to ... Kimura, who heads the company that runs the Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain and spent $3.1 million on a 613-pound bluefin last year. He expressed some regret at the purchase price then; this year he was said to be "even happier" than in 2019. The Asahi Shimbun reports the tuna was caught off the coast of Oma, in waters that have been home to the year's most expensive tuna for nine years running. (More bluefin tuna stories.)