Taipei 101. Photo by AnthonySantiago101, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commonss

Honnold, however, is not the first person to scale Taipei 101, but he is the first to do it without ropes. Alain Robert—known as the “French Spider Man”—climbed to the top of the building, then known as the Taipei World Financial Center, on Christmas Day 2004 as part of the tower’s opening celebrations. It took him four hours—slower than expected due to heavy rain. Honnold, who postponed his climb one day because of rain, made it to the summit in 90 minutes.

Honnold’s historic climb of El Capitan was documented in the Oscar-winning film Free Solo. This time around, it was Netflix that streamed his death-defying stunt in Taipei live to a global audience. Honnold has called his fee for the spectacle, suspected to be less than a million dollars, an “embarrassingly small amount,” but added that he would do it for free.

Scaling the exteriors of tall buildings, called buildering or urban climbing, is typically done without permission, but Honnold’s climb of Taipei 101 was sanctioned and he completed several practice runs, with ropes, in preparation for the Netflix event.

Taipei 101 was officially classified as the world’s tallest building from its opening in 2004 until it was surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in 2009. Designed by Taiwanese firm C.Y. Lee & Partners to evoke traditional Asian aesthetics in a modern structure, it features a middle section that resembles an elongated pagoda.

In an interview with the New York Times prior to this climb, Honnold said of Taipei 101, “You’re pinching the very outer edge, climbing over these ornamental dragon heads. There are a bunch of features on the building that just make it insanely fun, like a jungle gym.”