Published September 20, 2025 | By Alyx E, Founder of Collectors MD

When tragedy strikes, the marketplace rarely pauses to reflect—it rushes to capitalize. We’ve seen it too many times. A card that sold for $20 yesterday suddenly soars to $400+ the next day, not because the ink or cardboard changed, but because the life behind the image has ended.

Recently, that’s been the case with Charlie Kirk’s lone “licensed” card. His untimely passing turned a once-overlooked collectible into a 20x inflated commodity overnight.

This cycle is nothing new. When Kobe Bryant tragically passed, his cards and sneakers spiked in value within hours of the news. The same happened after Hulk Hogan’s shocking death earlier this year, as collectors rushed to grab anything tied to his legacy. We saw it again with NBA icons like Jerry West and Bill Russell, whose passings instantly transformed once-accessible collectibles into scarce, highly priced assets. Rickey Henderson—another legend whose passing shifted grief into profit—showed yet again how quickly the market turns loss into leverage. Even Pete Rose, despite the controversy surrounding his career, became the subject of frenzied buying when he died.

Time and again, we’ve watched grief transform into a marketplace feeding frenzy, where memorabilia and artifacts shift overnight from mementos of admiration to vehicles of profiteering. And it doesn’t stop at cards—sneakers, signed items, ticket stubs, anything tied to the individual becomes fuel for speculation the moment their story comes to a tragic close.

When loss turns into listings, ‘eBay greed’ shows us just how quickly tragedy gets priced and sold.

Profiting off of tragedy and loss is the lowest form of greed. What’s most unsettling is how normalized it has become. Entire ecosystems of buyers and sellers move like vultures, circling grief as if it were just another arbitrage opportunity. And yet, it’s not so simple to assign blame. Are the sellers wrong for listing at inflated prices, or the buyers wrong for validating those prices? Both sides play a part in turning mourning into market movement.

At its core, this phenomenon reveals something bigger than supply and demand—it exposes the hollow space where intention should live. The hype doesn’t care about legacy, memory, or respect. It cares about profit. And in that vacuum, the line between celebrating someone’s life and exploiting their death becomes disturbingly thin.

As collectors, we have to ask ourselves: What’s the cost of chasing cards tied to tragedy? What are we really honoring—our love for the athlete or entertainer, or our hunger for profit? Because if it’s the latter, we’re not collecting with intention. We’re speculating on loss. And that, more than anything else, should make us pause and seriously reevaluate why we’re in this hobby in the first place—and what we truly want from it.

#CollectorsMD
When the market feeds on grief, our responsibility is to ask whether we’re honoring a life—or exploiting a loss.

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