Most ten-year-olds are still asking for Lego sets and gaming consoles. Jean, a Dutch car enthusiast’s son, just turned ten and received something considerably more expensive: a $1.6 million Ferrari 599 GTO, one of just 599 ever built. The son of car enthusiast Jeroen van den Berg, better known as thehomelessguy on Instagram, turned ten this month and received a real 1:1 scale 599 GTO, which is quite a stretch from a Hot Wheels. And because apparently one ten-year-old wasn’t enough for this story, another ten-year-old handed him the keys. Vik, one of Jean’s closest friends, played salesman on behalf of the dealership, Hoefnagels.
The 599 GTO isn’t even Jean’s first Ferrari. His garage already includes a Tailor Made 488 Spider, suggesting this isn’t a case of a parent suddenly deciding to buy his son an exotic car for a milestone birthday. It helps to know whose son he is. His father, Jeroen van den Berg, is a Dutch entrepreneur in his fifties and a former face on Quote’s young rich list.
He runs Carlink, which imports and exports hard-to-find exotics and supplies corporate fleets, and back in 2015 he put its annual revenue at roughly $113 million. His own garage history reads like a fever dream. He split a Bugatti Chiron with DJ Afrojack, and the pair also brought an early new-generation Ford GT into the Netherlands. He once owned chassis number one of the Ferrari Sergio, one of just six built, and later admitted he was too nervous to drive it. Relatable, if you ignore the $4 million he asked for it in 2019.
The 599 GTO, finished in an understated Grigio Silverstone Opaco, looks almost restrained until you remember what’s under its hood. Because beneath the hood is the real reason collectors go weak at the knees: Ferrari’s naturally aspirated 6.0-liter V12, producing more than 660 horsepower and screaming past 8,000 rpm. The 599 GTO was effectively a road-legal 599XX, and like we said, Ferrari built just 599 examples. It also represents the end of an era, pairing that glorious V12 with Ferrari’s single-clutch automated manual gearbox derived from Formula 1 technology.
The GTO badge is doing plenty of work here, too. Ferrari has historically reserved those three letters for some of its most extreme road cars, and the 599 GTO was conceived as a more focused, track-inspired version of the 599 GTB Fiorano. It wasn’t merely a faster Ferrari with a bigger price tag. Ferrari stripped weight, sharpened the chassis and borrowed technology from its motorsport programs to make the 599 GTO considerably more serious than the standard 599.
Limited-production modern Ferraris have become serious collector pieces, and the 599 GTO sits particularly high on that list. Most kids’ birthday presents eventually disappear into a closet or end up forgotten in a loft. This one is sitting in a garage as a $1.6 million collectible, and Jean hasn’t even reached the legal age to drive it. Dad Jeroen, for his part, called the car a gift for his dearest boy and said he was proud of him, which is a lovely sentiment. That said, his next birthday is going to be a difficult act to follow.
