Most Expensive Thing You can't Buy

Alright, so here’s a question: What’s the most expensive thing in the world? Also, another question: what’s the point of finding out what the most expensive thing in the world is? 

None, there’s no point, but hey, you’re the one who googled it, so maybe don’t be so judgemental; and to answer the first question, let’s set a few rules. 

One, it has to be a single thing. This rule is a bit tricky to define, but it’s all about whether or not something intuitively feels like it’s a single item.

For example, we would accept something like a pepperoni pizza, which is made up of multiple things—sauce, cheese, dough, pepperoni,cholesterol—but that all come together to make one, cohesive, delicious, item.

But we would not accept something like, “New York City,” because New York City is made up of many disparate things—skyscrapers and bridges and subways that don’t work.

Two, it has to really exist. It can’t be some theoretical thing that would be expensive if someone made it—like a gold-plated elephant, or the Mona Lisa riding a T-Rex skeleton eating a Fabergé egg. It has to be a real thing that really exists. 

Three, it has to be accurately priced. Things can get tricky here because a price can technically be whatever the seller says it is, regardless of the item’s actual value. For example, if I take a pencil that I own and say that it would cost $400 trillion to buy it off me, that doesn’t make that pencil the most expensive item in the world—it just makes me annoying. 

So we’ll base value on one of three things: a previous purchase of that item, the cost of creating the item, or an expert appraisal—and then we’ll adjust for inflation. So, now that we have our three rules, let’s get started. 

If you Google what’s the world’s most expensive thing, the first answer you’re likely to find is, “antimatter.” There are even multiple videos on YouTube about this, and they’ll tell you that antimatter is worth around $62.5 trillion per gram - which is true, and is interesting. 

But is not the answer to our question, for two reasons: first of all, humanity has only ever created 18 nano grams of antimatter, which amounts to only $1,170,000—which is less than the cost of the world's most expensive office chair, let alone the world’s most expensive thing. 

Second of all, a substance feels like it shouldn’t count because it isn’t really a single item; after all, if we allow substances, I could say the answer is all the world’s gold, which is just a really lame and boring answer. 

                                      

So, let’s keep going. Right now, as I make this video, Apple is the world’s most valuable corporation, worth $1.164 trillion dollars. This feels closer to the right answer, but I still don’t think it qualifies. 

The reason is that even though Apple can be classified as one company, it still doesn’t feel like one thing—Apple consists of separate factories and warehouses and physical stores, plus employees, intellectual property, and now, for some reason, a TV show about Jason Momoa being blind (See), and that’s just too much different stuff to all count as one thing. 

So let’s focus on things that would qualify. In my quest to answer this question, I had to come across a lot of wrong answers before I found the right one—and now I’m going to tell them all to you, both because they’re interesting and also because if I just told you the answer right from the start this article would be 1 or 2 words long. 

My first thought was art, and while the most expensive piece of art ever sold is the Salvator Mundi—a blurry-looking painting of Jesus—the most expensive piece of art in existence is the Mona Lisa, a blurry-looking painting of a random Italian noblewoman who doesn’t have any eyebrows. 

It’s insured for about $850 million; enough to buy every person in Wyoming a round-trip ticket to Paris to see the Mona Lisa—but not enough to be the answer to our question. 

Then—because I’m me—I looked at planes. The most expensive aircraft in the world is the B-2 Spirit Bomber, which looks like a flying stingray, if a stingray could refuel mid-air, drop thermonuclear bombs, and cost $3.37 billion each. 

                                     

That still wasn’t enough, though so next I went to the opposite of planes—boats. Like the world’s most expensive plane, the world’s most expensive ship is another US military vessel. I mean hey, what a coincidence, it’s almost like the US spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. 

That most expensive ship is the USS Gerald R Ford, which cost $13 billion—enough to buy everyone in Omaha, Nebraska—Gerald Ford’s hometown—a Ford F-150; but, it’s still not the answer. 

My next stop was buildings, and the most expensive is the Great Mosque of Mecca, which cost an estimated $100 billion. That’s a lot of money—if Jeff Bezos bought the Great Mosque of Mecca, all he’d have left is a paltry $10 billion dollars—but while the Great Mosque is expensive. 

It’s beaten out by one thing, and so here it is :the answer you’ve read the whole article to learn—or, let’s be honest, the answer that you skipped to the end of the article to find. The world’s most expensive thing is the International Space Station, which adjusted for inflation, cost $177 billion.

Also Read: Space Strike

Look,I know, I know: technically that’s not the most expensive thing, “in the world,” as the ISS isn’t, “in the world.” It’s in space, but the way I see it, it’s not just floating in space, it’s in low earth orbit, it’s subject to the Earth’s gravity, it’ll fall back to Earth eventually, it was made by earth.