A rock climber who scaled a 1,667-foot-tall skyscraper in Taiwan without a rope says, despite his hefty payday, he’d have done it for free.

The building, named Taipei 101 for the number of its floors, is 508m (1,667ft) tall, made of steel, glass and concrete and is designed to resemble a stick of bamboo. Alex Honnold, an American who was the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo”, has more than halved the time record of the only other person to scale the tower.

Alain Robert, a Frenchman who called himself “Spiderman”, made it to the top of Taipei 101 – at the time the world’s tallest building – in four hours. He did so with ropes and a harness. Honnold completed the climb in one hour and 31 minutes.

Honnold was rewarded for the spectacle, though he said the amount was “embarrassing”. According to the New York Times, he was paid in the mid-six figures for the climb – and they put an estimate of around $500,000 dollars (£365,000) on his fee.

He told the news outlet: “It’s less than my agent aspired to. I mean, I would do it for free. If there was no TV program and the building gave me permission to go do the thing, I would do the thing because I know I can, and it’d be amazing.”

The ascent in Taiwan’s capital was originally set to take place on Saturday but was delayed by wet weather. The climb was streamed live on Netflix, which said there was a delay on the live feed should the worst happen. Honnold completed the climb in one hour and 31 minutes on Sunday – and celebrated the achievement with one word: “Sick.”

Honnold has scaled some 200 buildings since the 1990s, mostly with his bare hands. Due to the illegal nature of the activity, he has been arrested more than 170 times. “You feel like you’re literally in a movie,” he told the New York Times, with “cops that are trying to catch the bad guy climbing the building.”

Honnold is also known for being the first person to climb El Capitan without ropes or safety gear. The 915m (3,000-foot) granite cliff is in California’s Yosemite National Park.

But climbing a skyscraper is a completely different matter. On a rock face, climbers must constantly adapt their bodies and change moves, as their hands are always searching for different holds.

During a building ascent, however, climbers repeat the same few movements hundreds of times to scale dozens of stories of windows, steel bars, and concrete gaps. This creates a repetitive “pull-up” motion that, when repeated over a hundred times, heavily taxes the climber’s muscles and fingers.

After his heroic ascent, Honnold was greeted at the top of the building by his wife, who expressed concern for the wind and heat as he climbed.