Ask HN: What is the highest hourly billing rate that you have ever heard of?

We once ended up billing what was effectively £4900 for 2 x 25 minute sessions to show a bunch of hedge fund managers how to send a tweet. That equates to £5880 an hour. If I include travel each way it was only £2261 an hour.

I know a person who bills $3,500 for a basic 30 min general anaesthetic ($7k an hour). That cost does not include the surgeons fee, or the cost of the consumables, or the cost of the operating room. The operating room itself is about $150 a minute. Consumables are astronomical (anything medical is just expensive) and surgeon’s fee’s depend on the surgeon and also the specialty. Ranging from like $5k to about $60k (the most I’ve ever known to be charged) for a single procedure.

I know of a heart surgeon who makes $2,100 per hour.

$10,000.

Knowing which screw to turn, apparently fixing a supercomputer.

1982, I think. $1,500/hr.

There was this massive seed drill machine called a "Maxi Cultivator" that was more complicated than a combined harvester and made in Italy, had to be pulled by a SAME (aka Lamborghini) tractor with a ground speed PTO, all sorts of "prototype" madness for a million dollar machine.

I worked for a company that was the USA side of the partnership to demonstrate and hopefully sell these machines to farmers doing the new "no-till" style planting. We had this thing ready to go, the day before some big farm day show, and the test runs broke something deep.

So this Italian master mechanic dude gets flown to the wilds of West TN overnight to fix this machine right now. Spoke no English, but he and our mechanics were able to communicate quite effectively. Sign language and profanity are universal.

He got it fixed in 4hr and the show went on; he hung around for the rest of event just in case, I think on the manufacturer's dime. I recall the bitching about the rate he got billed at later.

Not really his fault, but Jayson Williams getting a $94 million contract and only playing 30 games before a career-ending injury is awfully expensive amortizing that over the hours he contributed in two months of play. I guess that technically isn't hourly billing.

There's Bill Clinton getting $750,000 for a single speaking engagement which was roughly an hour.

If that isn't the real answer, it's going to be something stupid nobody knows about like some rich asshole paying Jay-Z $5 million to give a private performance at his daughter's sweet 16 party.

7,500 EUR an hour. This was for one of the best tax consultants in the jurisdiction to set up a fully "tax optimized" holding structure for an extremely wealthy person, think he ended up billing like 15-20 hours just for his work, and don't know how much went to trust companies etc.

OK not a billing rate but Bezos has earned an average of $300k/h since birth.

I think David Boies (lawyer) hourly rate was $1900 a couple years ago, from what I understand. Most biglaw partners in NYC bill at $1k-$1.5k per hour, I think.

The other side of this is billing anything for something that doesn’t do what you want.

Usually migrate some council, gov department, hospital to some payroll / erp / crm for multiple years for multiple millions to something that doesn’t work.

Or a lighting cable that doesn’t charge the phone, that’s almost free money

> Salvador Dalí was cast in Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of "Dune", he demanded to be paid $100,000 per hour

$30k per day, AU tax barrister

Over $8k/hr for development of highly specific middleware.

I knew an international tax law consultant whose company charged her out at $10k/hr.

$1k+/hr, something along the lines of that, lawyer.

1100 for lawyers

12k...taxes.