What is the most expensive thing on Earth?

[Lagmonster]

So with the holidays approaching, I got to being curious about the more extravagant wastes of money out there. Which eventually had me wandering through elite super-rich auction sites looking at the kind of stuff millions of spare dollars can get you.

But I'm curious and would love to challenge people: What is the most expensive fucking thing on Earth?

The item must be:
1) An actual item. I realize that this rules out expensive services, but I'm looking for things.
2) For sale. You can't simply put a price tag on France and declare victory. You have to be able to exchange actual U.S. currency for the actual thing in question.
3) Able to be taken seriously. Not a scam, gag, mistake, or the offering of someone delusional. Although I get that there might be some intersection between dead serious and crazy, I wouldn't count an ebay ad selling lint for a trillion dollars.

So far, I'm up to a $160M private island for sale (Rangyai Island, in Thailand), although there are some unlisted price islands floating around that could be more expensive.

I have a feeling I haven't hit the ceiling yet.

[Borgholio]

You can't simply put a price tag on France and declare victory.

Well yeah, given how the price is somewhere between what'd you'd find at a swap meet and the bargain bin at Wal-mart, it wouldn't qualify anyways...


Anywho, while it might not be immediately for sale, I imaging buying an obsolete / mothballed naval warship would be worth more than $160m.

Although you ruled out services, I also imaging that there are nations willing to pay a lot more than $160m to acquire a nuclear weapon...which would of course mean hiring people to steal the thing from a Russian depot, but you're paying for the warhead...not just the services of some mercenaries.

[aerius]

Multinational corporations. In theory you could own one if you can come up with $100 billion and buy up all the shares.

[Lagmonster]

I'm thinking about whether, say, Microsoft would count as an 'item'. It's more of a collection of items, assets, contracts, patents, properties, and cash. I suppose it would fit the spirit of the OP, but it isn't what I had in mind.

Nuclear weapon is good. Problem is, as you said, it's not exactly 'for sale' despite the fact that you could arrange to exchange cash for one. I think to eliminate escalating wild speculation I have to retroactively disallow things that were for sale by their actual owners.

I was concentrating on private real estate, but now I think that military hardware is probably a good way to go; certainly there must be billion-plus-dollar assets that governments actually do manufacture and sell.

[Ahriman238]

The biggest single thing I got in five minutes was the Antillia Tower in South Mumbai, India. A 27-story private residence with 400,000 square feet of living space, present residence of Mukesh Ambani with over 600 permanent staff. Rating vary from 1 to 2 billion USD.

[Irbis]

You guys think so small. Billion dollars? That's just over three tons of 2008 rhodium:



In volume, it's even more insignificant, three tons could fill a small barrel.

But if you looked for even more expensive metal, technetium would take the spot, not only natural world supply of that metal is just a few tenths of a nanogram, man made supply needs to be reprocessed from most heavily irradiated rods, in last 50 years we produced less of it than the amount of gold mined in just a few hours.

Though, forget metals. Ultra-thin foil targets used in Science™ tend to be quite expensive - ones sold per square cm basis would cost (after conversion) hundreds of thousands to millions per gram, or at least used to 12 years ago, maybe the process is cheaper now.

Oh, and all the above is still nothing next to antimatter. At our current production methods, one gram is estimated to cost anywhere from 20 billion to 65 trillion [citation].

[TimothyC]

The most expensive mass produced item that can be purchased by an individual is likely an Airbus A380 at a bit over 400 million USD. If you get out of mass produced you get into custom yachts which can reach just as high.

[tim31]

Man can you imagine just straight up buying an A380

'Can I get a receipt? It's a gift.'

[Simon_Jester]

Trouble is, Irbis, you can't buy antimatter for cash. Rhodium, technetium, and foil targets, on the other hand, are very much available for purchase.

That raises a question only the OP can answer, though. "One gold brick" is a thing, and a pretty cheap thing by the standards of multimillion dollar products. But what about "ten thousand gold bricks" or "a single 100-ton gold brick" or something like that? Does that count?

Because if so, we could theoretically have a 'thing' which is a composite mass of stuff bought from many places. Such as "the entire world production of rhodium for the year 2013," which would be very expensive... but is not, realistically, a thing you can just up and buy without running around making separate purchases from a lot of different sources.

[Lagmonster]

Good point. I'm trying not to be too anal in limiting myself, but I'm trying to avoid antic lunacy. If it were up to me, I'd say that when talking about precious metals and the like, I'd point at a cross between clause 2) and 3). If you can't answer where you would reasonably find the thing for sale, and purchase it, and do this all legally and feasibly, it doesn't count.

I'm also sticking literally to clause 1), where it has to be reasonably argued to be "an" item. If you can lay out a plausible path to the identification, purchase, and retrieval of a 100-ton gold brick, I'd say that counts. Ten thousand regular gold bricks would not qualify even if you had a way to get them, because it's not a single item but copies of a single, less valuable item. Ten thousand twinkies would also qualify that way, and that's clearly not in the spirit of the exercise.

[Terralthra]

By that logic, could you then not count, say, the A380 factory (clearly even more than the $400 million per plane), because it's a conglomeration of machines and infrastructure which would be purchased separately?

[Executor32]

Anywho, while it might not be immediately for sale, I imaging buying an obsolete / mothballed naval warship would be worth more than $160m.

I dunno about that. After being decommissioned in 2001, the Colossus-class aircraft carrier NAeL Minas Gerais (formerly HMS Vengeance) was listed on eBay Motors in late 2003, in the category 'Power boats 80 feet and longer'; at nearly 700 feet, I'd say she definitely qualified.
Bidding got up to nearly $8 million before eBay cancelled the auction due to rules prohibiting the sale of military ordnance. I actually saw the listing before its removal, having come across it completely by accident when I decided to see what the most expensive boat on eBay was. I'd been expecting a yacht or something, imagine my surprise.

[Borgholio]

Anywho, while it might not be immediately for sale, I imaging buying an obsolete / mothballed naval warship would be worth more than $160m.

I dunno about that. After being decommissioned in 2001, the Colossus-class aircraft carrier NAeL Minas Gerais (formerly HMS Vengeance) was listed on eBay Motors in late 2003, in the category 'Power boats 80 feet and longer'; at nearly 700 feet, I'd say she definitely qualified.
Bidding got up to nearly $8 million before eBay cancelled the auction due to rules prohibiting the sale of military ordnance. I actually saw the listing before its removal, having come across it completely by accident when I decided to see what the most expensive boat on eBay was. I'd been expecting a yacht or something, imagine my surprise.

...

I want a carrier...

[Executor32]

I know, right? Imagine the deck parties you could throw on that thing!

[phred]

What happened to that fuckoff ugly yacht thread? Found it.

I want a carrier...

I'll chip in a couple bucks, we can go halvsies on it

[Borgholio]

Sounds like a great idea for a RAR! Thread created...

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=160099

[Irbis]

Trouble is, Irbis, you can't buy antimatter for cash. Rhodium, technetium, and foil targets, on the other hand, are very much available for purchase.

Um, that's exactly what Fermilab, CERN, or LLNL do. Take dollars on one end and output antimatter on the other. How that does differ from any regular old mine functionality? Look in my link, NASA even specifically answers 'how much antimatter will X million dollars purchase'. And it's not like NASA was the only buyer interested.

[LaCroix]

And here I always thought it would either be bottled water, the coffee in Nescafe capsules or injet printer ink...

The problem with the question is that any building can be made big and lavish enough to cost billions to buy it, so you could always run amok with covering sqare miles with a never-ending hollywood mansion to apply.

[Lagmonster]

The problem with the question is that any building can be made big and lavish enough to cost billions to buy it, so you could always run amok with covering sqare miles with a never-ending hollywood mansion to apply.

Not if that thing doesn't exist. It's easy to speculate about something that could be the most expensive object on earth, if you were to build it or find it. That's not what I was looking for - I was looking for the most expensive object you could own right now. Which I'm getting hints to be either specific quantities of exotic matter (which someone posted actually exists and is purchaseable) or a cutting-edge vehicle of some type (an aircraft carrier or mega-yacht I think was the lead, I'm typing from memory).

[Enigma]

2-8a Rutland Gate in London, England, is AFAIK still for sale at $484.51 million.

There is a mansion (20 story building but each level is double height) in Mumbai that is worth $1 billion. If you have the dough I bet you could persuade the current owners to sell it.

[Borgholio]

That's going to be kinda hard to figure out. That depends on what is actually for sale at this very moment. For instance, the most expensive Yacht actually afloat cost the owner about $600m to buy. But it's not currently for sale. The most expensive bridge in the world is valued at about $6b, but again...not currently for sale. When talking about buying a large supply of exotic materials or rare metals, how do you know that the full world's output of the stuff is actually for sale? A good portion of it is probably already owned via contract to various buyers. Even something as "common" as diamonds, are pretty much controlled via cartel and you couldn't buy out from underneath De Beers even if you had the money to do so.

[The Kernel]

These probably stretch the definitely a tad but they are ABSOLUTELY for sale at the right price. There is nothing stoping anyone from snapping up their own should they chose to do so--heck most of the industry has undergone consolidation at this point just because these damn things are so frighteningly expensive. Have a look at this:



That's the 450mm wafer/14nm node Intel Fab 42...the most advanced chip fabrication facility in the world. It cost a cool $5 billion to construct...and that's not even the biggest one around.



TSMC runs even larger fabs as they are a semiconductor foundry and their largest plant Fab 15 tips the scales at around $10 billion capex. That's more than a Ford-class aircraft carrier and just as irreplaceable--should Fab 15 find itself on the wrong end of a natural disaster it would almost certain trigger a global depression as chip factories take years to build, are insanely rare due to their super high costs and are not fungible at all even if there was excess supply somewhere else. Plus CPUs (especially the ARM heavy loads that TSMC makes) are the quintessential drivers of the tech economy--without them you don't have cell phones, smart appliances, Roombas, modern cars, etc.

[PKRudeBoy]

If we go by weight and retail price, LSD is pretty high up considering a 100 microgram dose sells for around $10.

[Sea Skimmer]

But you could never buy enough to get into the billions.

The Vogtle nuclear plant is a 14 billion dollar project and several others are similar, I'd say that's about the most expensive thing you could buy without getting into takeovers of large companies. A nuclear powered aircraft carrier isn't going to be for sale; anyone could in principle buy a nuclear plant as long as they also owned a private company licensed to operate one.

[Welf]

I would suggest buying the prestige of having bought Apple Inc. No, that is not incorrect grammar.

Apple Inc has a market capitalization of roughly 500 bn USD at the moment. However, if you buy one share for 554 USD you lose that amount in money and gain the same amount in shares, so it's a zero sum game.
But if you buy a controlling share or all of it you have to pay a "controlling premium". That premium is between 20-50%, depending on how cool a company is. Some minor part of that is from better control and less costs with no other shareholders, but mostly it's because of coolness. That is why sport franchises and newspapers sell for an higher premium than a shoe maker.
Apple is pretty one of the coolest companies you can own. Even other billionaires will be jealous if you own such a company. And when you are already rich, that is the most important thing.
I put the premium of Apple thus at 50%, and deduct 10% for actual cost savings. That still leaves a price tag of 200 bn USD for pure vanity.