The world’s most expensive objects: by weight
There was probably never any doubt, but it is striking to learn by just how much diamonds trounce everything else in the realm of expensive stuff. We took a bunch of high-value objects - such as paintings and buildings - calculated the price per kg, then compared this with the value of various fungibles. Those “chunks of coal made good under pressure”, as Henry Kissinger called diamonds, are without peer - even when you consider just an average one, retailing at around £6,890 per carat. (Our benchmark was a “G” colour with “very small inclusions”; a “D” would have cost more.) Raphael’s The Madonna of the Pinks came close.
It probably suffered by virtue of being painted on a yew panel (weighing 800g), and one suspects the right Picasso, on canvas, would give diamonds a run for their money. Of the luxury foodstuffs, it’s most extravagant to order the prized white winter truffle from Piedmont, which is considerably more expensive than the world’s rarest caviar - almas - from the albino beluga sturgeon. But if they come at a premium, spare a thought for the owners of the Green Monkey, which, when he was bought for $16 million in 2006, was the most expensive racehorse ever sold - worth more than his weight in gold. He never won a race.
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6 Responses to “The world’s most expensive objects: by weight”
I thought printer ink was pretty high up there, too. Price per ML?
@Wowser
A HP 30ml cartridge is £28.74 online. In at number 7 with £958/kg!
Panasonic SD 32GB memory card , £230 at 2 grams is £115,000 per kg?
some rare postage stamps will be even more valuable.
Postage stamp 1856 British Guiana, 1 cent, $1M, last sold in 1980
Weight 0.05 grams estimate, $20,000 Million /kg?
Antimatter. The Large Hadron Collider, total cost approx £2.6 billion, can produce one billionth of a gram of the stuff a year. Assuming a billion is 1,000,000,000, the cost per kilo would be £26,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 26 septillion quid.
The price of Class A drugs are rather expensive, fitting in between 2 and 3 on this list.
Cocaine costs £51,659 per kilo; heroin costs £75,750 per kilo.
(UK street prices)
source: http://www.ukdpc.org.uk/Publications.shtml#Drug_Markets_report
Some more numbers here (American, so in $ and Lb)
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/density
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