A Detroit Man Spent 11 Years Building a Rubber Band Ball. It Now Weighs as Much as an Elephant.

DETROIT, Nov. 5, 2026 — Claude P. Moore's rubber band ball started with two rubber bands. Eleven years later it weighs 11,578 pounds, about as much as an elephant, and Guinness World Records says it is the largest one ever made.

Moore picked up the habit as a kid. He has hemophilia, a rare bleeding disorder, and spent much of his childhood in hospital waiting rooms and doctors' offices, where there were always rubber bands lying around, Guinness World Records said. In middle school he built one "as big as a chair." A classmate stole it.

The record ball got its start in 2015, when some coworkers challenged him to make a really big one. He took them seriously. The ball eventually got too large for his garage and moved into a storage unit of its own, UPI reported, where it grew until it nearly touched the walls.

Weighing it was its own production. In August, dozens of family members and friends rolled the ball out of the container and hooked it to a crane, which carried it to Belle Isle, the island park in the Detroit River, for the official measurement. A Guinness adjudicator climbed into the crane's cab to read the scale herself as the ball was lifted into the air.

The number cleared the old record easily. That mark was 9,032 pounds, set by Joel Waul in Florida in 2008.

Moore handed out signed copies of his book about living with hemophilia at the ceremony while the crowd chanted his name. Asked why he did it, he kept the explanation short. "I broke the record," he told Guinness, "because I said I would."