What's The Most Expensive Thing Ever?

[00:00:00]If you saved a billion dollars every single day for your entire life, you still wouldn't come close to affording the most expensive thing ever. But to find out what that is, we'll be going on a journey through the most valuable things in existence, all starting with you. The raw ingredients needed to make a human cost only 152,000. But if that's out of budget, you could just boil down a pig because chemically you're pretty much the same. They're just slightly tastier. But since you're already fully assembled, the government officially values you at 14.2 million.

[00:00:35]And they're lowballing you because if someone hypothetically harvested all your organs, they could make 45 million.

[00:00:41]You're pretty expensive. But to find the most expensive thing ever, we need to look at much costlier items. With the next being a well-known painting that became famous for all the wrong reasons.

[00:00:52]It's 1503 in Italy. A rich silk merchant goes up to a painter and says, "Could you make me a painting of my wife?"

[00:00:58]"Sure.

[00:00:59]Give me like uh like 2 weeks."

[00:01:10]Leonardo da Vinci never fully finished that painting, but he actually sold it right [music] before he died to the King of France. And it stayed in the bedrooms of powerful guys until ending up at a museum where no one cared until it got stolen, then found, then taken on a PR campaign. And now this 30-in plank of wood smeared with colored oil is valued [music] at 1 billion dollars. But nature's greatest work of art was found by complete accident. Sir Thomas Major Cullinan dug a hole in the ground and filled it with Africans to mine rocks for him. And in 1905, a diamond was found. And it happened to be the biggest diamond ever.

[00:01:49]Completely colorless, zero imperfections, the most chemically perfect rock produced by the planet. And the guy who found it was this guy, the mines manager. He was just going for a stroll when he randomly saw it in the wall, and he got a nice check for it.

[00:02:04]Then the rock got cut up and shipped in a literal postal box to more white people. The total value of this rock is estimated at $2 billion, making it the most expensive luxury item ever thanks to its rarity and prestige. But the most expensive land ever is something you would never expect.

[00:02:22]France owned all this land in 1803, and the United States wanted a little piece of it. So they went over to France with $10 million and said, "Can we buy a little piece of your land?" France's leader and conqueror of Europe, Napoleon, was like, "HOW ABOUT YOU PAY ME $15 MILLION FOR THE WHOLE THING?"

[00:02:41]Y- YES. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States at the cost of 4 cents per acre. This land today is worth thousands per acre, making it widely considered the single greatest land purchase in history. As long as you don't ask the people originally living there.

[00:02:58]>> [snorts] >> But the Louisiana Purchase wasn't the most expensive in history. There was a piece of land that cost way more than the entire American Midwest, and it's this.

[00:03:08]This plot of land with a parking lot that cost $3 billion. Why did this parking lot cost more than a fifth of the United States? Well, back then the Louisiana Purchase was a gamble on an uncharted frontier. This modern-day plot of land in the center of one of the most valuable financial districts on Earth, where the government artificially restricts the land supply, was just a much safer investment. Land is valued for its potential, but the houses we put on top of the land are somehow even more expensive. In 2019, a finance guy spent $240 million on a high-altitude hollow brick in New York City that he doesn't even live in. Actually, all of these buildings are half empty cuz the rich people buying them are just treating them as investments. If they actually needed a place to stay, they would just do what the richest guy in India did and spend $2 billion erecting their own personal monument that has a dark secret. This is Antilia, the most expensive private residence in the world valued today at 4.6 billion. It has a 168-car garage, three helipads, a snow room, and the entire thing was built on an orphanage.

[00:04:16]And if you're wondering where the orphans went, the house also has 600 servants. There are investments, there are status symbols, but the most expensive house ever is the hardest to truly value. Its purchase price?

[00:04:29]21,000 pounds in 1761. When King George III bought Buckingham House, it was just a little shack for him to store his wife.

[00:04:38]But after a few hundred years of renovations and millions in state funding, it became a 775-room palace. Its value is estimated at 4.9 billion pounds, but this is just a guess based on its prime location and historical significance. To find something more valuable than any house, we just need to scale up to the most impressive and disastrous structures in the world, mega projects.

[00:05:05]The US Interstate Highway System is the most expensive mega project in history, costing an inflation-adjusted 634 billion. But it was worth it. For every $1 of that cost, it's returned $6 in economic output. This project had a clear problem, a clear plan, and a clear result.

[00:05:21]Pretty straightforward.

[00:05:23]In 2021, Saudi Arabia started building a 110-mile line-shaped city made out of Empire State Building tall glass mirrors. It was supposed to cost 500 billion and be done by 2030. But now the date is maybe 2080, and the cost is maybe 8.8 trillion. The line will be the most expensive mega project ever if it actually gets built.

[00:05:46]If 45 Mount Everest above all of this is the International Space Station, the most expensive single object ever built by humans, but its cost is the least impressive thing about it. See, legendary mega projects like the pyramids represent what one civilization could do. The ISS represents what every civilization together could do. It took hundreds of thousands of experts from all over the world to manufacture parts that fit together perfectly when assembled [music] in an empty void that would kill a human in 90 seconds. This is the greatest masterpiece ever built by humans, and it shows what can be accomplished when the world comes together. But, it's way more costly when the world comes apart.

[00:06:29]War is pretty expensive. The American Civil War cost so much that to fund it, the government had to invent paper money and the FEDERAL INCOME TAX. GOD [screaming] DAMN IT!

[00:06:43]WORLD WAR I COST SO MUCH that Germany was still paying it off until 2010. And World [music] War II was the most expensive conflict in history. The full global cost of this war has never been calculated, but it involved every major power devoting a majority of their entire economy to destruction. [music] By the end of the war, 70 million were dead, a majority being civilians, and most of the involved countries were in shambles. Military spending as a percentage of GDP has never come close to World War II levels since. And if it ever does, we probably won't be aware. War is pretty expensive.

[00:07:18]World War II military spending was 25 trillion in today's dollars, but the cost of its destruction is unknown.

[00:07:27]All the things in this video have value for different reasons, but the most expensive thing ever is the most unusual.

[00:07:37]Every single particle has an antiparticle with an opposite charge. When they touch, they annihilate and release energy. A single gram of antimatter could release more energy than three Hiroshima bombs.

[00:07:51]Bananas. Every 75 minutes, an atom in a banana decays, producing one single particle of antimatter. But, the particle is so small that if you had one banana for every human that has ever existed, [music] you would have to wait 97 times the age of the universe to produce 1 g of antimatter. But, that still wouldn't work because the banana antimatter particles only exist for 125 [music] picoseconds, which is 1 billionth of a blink.

[00:08:20]The only way to make a meaningful amount of antimatter is by firing tiny particles at almost the speed of light into a metal rod, then catching the debris in a vacuum. There's currently only one facility that does this, and in its entire existence, it's made less than 10 billionths of a gram of antimatter, which would make enough energy to power a light bulb for 4 hours. Antimatter could be the most efficient energy source [music] ever, and studying it could answer questions about how the universe was formed. But, it's so difficult to make [music] that NASA estimates 1 g would cost 62.5 trillion.

[00:08:56]But, if we ever somehow manage to get a gram of antimatter, wouldn't the most expensive thing be whoever owns the antimatter, which would probably be a country, maybe the United States, which is already worth 180 trillion. But, then the Earth is worth 5 quadrillion. And now that we're in space, there are asteroids floating around with quintillions worth [music] of gold and platinum. And the Sun is made of gas worth 30 nonillion. The universe is filled with an infinite amount of wealth, all of which we got for free.