Most people reading this are probably very familiar with buying things between $0-1000 USD (such as everyday food and everyday clothing, perhaps weekly rent). Some of us will have experience buying more expensive items, like a car ($10,000s), or maybe even a house ($100,000s or even $1,000,000s). Some of you might want to object to those numbers I listed, they obviously will vary wildly in different markets, but I want to now ask about much more expensive things.
What is the cost of some items that few-if-any Lemmy users can afford? What can the absurdly rich buy that we can’t? How much does it cost them?
You must give a money value with some evidence, no just knee-jerking and saying something vague like “elections” - instead find articles disclosing how much manipulation campaigns cost a political party.
Buying an island:
https://www.privateislandsonline.com/ lists many islands. They’re between about $100,000 and $75,000,000 (some lower-end ones are undeveloped and just trees), most seem to sit in the millions range. There are also renting options but prices aren’t public.
This advertisement blog post shows similar prices: https://www.jamesedition.com/stories/real-estate/how-much-does-a-private-island-cost/
Honestly at these days a nice new car is around 40k. Buying any car new is a huge luxury.
But if yo want to go the hypercar market can be really insane. Here is an article with cars and prices.I know someone who genuinely considered buying a submarine
Mega-yachts.
Here is a yacht buying/selling website with a filter for mega-yachts: https://www.yachtworld.com/boats-for-sale/type-power/class-power-mega/
The most expensive ones listed there are in the lower hundreds of millions (US$). I didn’t check if these were new or used. The smallest ones I would start to call mega-yachts were mid-to-upper hundred of thousands.
[image of the most expensive ones]
There’s also this calculator site for the purchase annual operating expenses of superyachts: https://www.luxyachts.com/yacht-cost-calculator
i feel like this is a good place to mention the ship shipping ships
yo dawg i herd u liek boats so we put yo boat on a boat so you can ride while you ride
Corporation takeovers. From what i could find, the most expensive ever was 1999 takeover of Mannesmann by Vodafone Airtouch plc at $183 billion ($334.7 billion in 2024 dollars).
Fun fact, in 193 CE Didius Iulianus bought the Roman Empire (or more accurately the emperor position) for roughly 1 671 480 000 dollars. Very roughly since we don’t exactly know how many praetorians there were so you might cut that number by half, and the calculation is by silver price. Also, he was soon murdered by the same people who murdered his predecessor and sold him the empire when someone with an army and know how to use it shown up (Septimius Severus). Alas.
Most expensive single thing ever would be ISS at over 150 billion.
Private jet aircraft. They are very expensive to buy (say from US$ 5 to 70 million), but also shockingly expensive to operate. It’s hard to put an exact number to operation costs since it’s a mix of fixed and variable costs, but a fancy jet like a G650 is likely gonna be a few million a year in op costs (fuel, maintenance, management, crew salaries. training, hangar fees, facility fees, and so on. Also, few people actually buy aircraft directly. Rather they pay a management company to set up an ownership entity that owns and manages the aircraft for you.
It’s tempting to think of a jet as a vehicle, but really it’s more like paying people to do all the work and waiting for you so that the time you spend waiting is as minimal as possible. When most people fly, you buy a ticket, you book a ride to the airport, you go through security, customs, immigration, ticketing, baggage handling, and so on. Then you wait to board, wait for everyone else to board, wait for other planes to take off, maybe fly to a hub location enroute to your destination, and so on. If you’re in a plane like a G650, you pay other people to do all of this for you so that you can show up to a plane that’s fueled and ready to go, with the cabin AC at the temp you like, and your cocktail already poured sitting at the table by your seat. You get in, they start the roll.
It’s lavish, opulent, and wasteful in the extreme, but still a damn nice way to travel.
