Elvis Presley guitar goes up for auction in London — expected to sell for up to £1.5 million

A photo of Elvis with a guitar. — (Image credit: Sothebys)

You’ve probably heard of high-end Gibson and Fender guitars costing a not-that-small fortune, but a piece of music history is expected to put them in the shade.

We’re talking about Elvis’s own guitar, which has just opened to bids at Sotheby's in London, with a sale estimate of between $1 million and $2 million, or up to around £1.5 at today's conversion rate.

This very guitar was used by Elvis in his famous TV appearance dubbed the ’68 Comeback Special, broadcast by NBC. It’s a scene recreated in the 2022 biopic Elvis, in which Austin Butler played Elvis — seemingly pretty much changing his own accent permanently in the process.

The guitar is a Hagstrom Viking II — so not a brand necessarily beloved or even super-well-known among non guitar fans. But it’s still an icon, and one even more strongly linked to Elvis given you don’t see dozens of rock stars over the years with a Hagstrom slung around their necks, as you do with a Les Paul or Strat.

It’s a semi-hollow design similar in style to Gibson’s ES-335, with dual pickups. The listing says they’re humbuckers, suggesting they may not be the originals as the 1960s models will have used single coils, according to our own research.

$900,000 is the starting bid for the guitar, and bidding runs on until April 23rd. Have a million dollars lying around? You can check out the listing at the Sotheby's website.

The mad part is this isn’t even close to being the most pricey electric guitar put up for auction this year, let alone of all time.

In March 2026, Dave Gilmour’s famous black Stratocaster sold for $14.55 million, or around £10.8 by today’s exchange rate. Back in 2019 the same guitar sold at auction for $4 million.

The Elvis guitar is part of a brace of music lots from Sotheby's that includes a Gibson ES-5 guitar autographed by B.B. King, a kick drum used in the Beatles’ Real Love music video and a Telecaster owned by Freddie Mercury, with an upper estimate of $40,000.

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Andrew Williams has written about all sorts of stuff for more than a decade — from tech and fitness to entertainment and fashion. He has written for a stack of magazines and websites including Wired, TrustedReviews, TechRadar and Stuff, enjoys going to gigs and painting in his spare time. He's also suspiciously good at poker.

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