Jed Clampett and the rest of The Beverly Hillbillies might have made their fortunes on black gold… Texas tea… but, even with recent price spikes, crude oil is still cheaper today than it was in 1861 (though nowhere near the astonishingly low prices of the mid-60s). When we think of high-value products, we tend to think of the shiny and the glittery: gold, other precious metals and gems.
Mostly, that’s a pretty good guess, but metals, with one exception, sit pretty mid-range on the list of most-expensive.
Some of the show-offy luxury delicacies aren’t quite as (relatively) high-priced as you might think. All prices in this article are in NZD. Saffron is around $11.32 per gram, while beluga caviar is $14. Fancy-shmancy To’ak chocolate is just 15c more.
Prices jump when we come to the metals. There are the old favourites, of course: platinum ($55) and gold ($91.68), which is just outshone by palladium ($92). New technologies have pushed up demand (and therefore prices) for metals like iridium ($261) and rhodium ($688). But all those metals are blown out the water by plutonium, at $10,210 per gram.
Although hydrogen can become metallic under some conditions, it’s its radioactive isotope, tritium, which is the one of the most expensive substances on earth. While in the real world, tritium is used (obviously in tiny amounts) in such mundane items as self-illuminating “EXIT” signs in public buildings, in Spider-Man 2 it was used to fuel Otto Octavius’ fusion reactor. If Doc Oc was showing off just a single gram of tritium, he was holding $47,208 in his gleaming robotic claws.
Less expensive than plutonium or tritium, there’s some weird non-metals or minerals that people will pay ludicrous amounts for.
“Caterpillar fungus” is a a hybrid caterpillar fungus that lives in, and kills, caterpillars. The world’s most expensive parasite only appears for a couple of weeks every year in remote parts of Nepal, India, Tibet and Bhutan. Like a whole lot of weird stuff, it’s used in traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicine – if you want to pay up to $197 for a gram of the gunk.
On the other side of China from Tibet is the Fujian province, where the rare Da Hong Pao tea costs $2203 a gram. That’s an expensive cuppa.
Snake venoms are used in medicine to make certain drugs. The priciest of the lot is the second-strongest of the lot: coral snake venom. If you want to risk milking a coral snake, you can ask a staggering $6295 for every gram.
One of the most expensive drugs in the world, though, is Soliris, used to treat an ultra-rare disease called Atypical Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome. Just one 300mg vial costs over $10k – or $36k per gram. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board ruled that in 2017 that Alexion, the pharmaceutical company that produces Soliris, sold the drug at an excessive price from 2009 to 2015.
As might be expected, though, gems are heavy hitters when it comes to priciness.
The price of diamonds depends heavily on their quality, with prices varying from $15,000 to $212,000 per gram.
In between are taaffeite ($20k), benitoite ($33.5k), red beryl ($79k) and serendibite ($142k). Moving up the price scale, grandidierite costs $204k. Painite is mined in Myanmar and there are only about 1,000 painite crystals in circulation. Consequently, the gram cost is an eye-watering half a million NZ dollars.
The true heavyweight of the gem world, though, are red diamonds. The rarest gems on the planet – fewer than 30 are known to exist, most of them weighing less than half a carat – cost an astonishing $7.8m a gram.
Have we topped out the price scale, yet? Hold on to your wallets, folks, cos now we’re getting into some really stratospheric stuff.
Californium is a synthetic radioactive first made at Berkeley in 1950. It’s used to find the layers of water and oil in oil wells – and costs $43 million a gram.
And now we come to the most expensive substance known to humanity – and it’s not even matter.
It’s anti-matter.
No, this isn’t made-up science fiction stuff, anti-matter is real. It doesn’t naturally occur on Earth, because, when anti-matter and ordinary matter come into contact, they immediately annihilate each other in a flash of pure energy. The Hiroshima bomb converted less than one gram of matter to energy, so you can imagine the havoc even tiny amounts of anti-matter could wreak on Earth.
Naturally, scientists have gone ahead and created anti-matter (under very controlled conditions, using hard vacuum and magnetic fields to keep the anti-matter apart from the not-anti-matter) in the lab. The cost?
Over $98 trillion per gram.
As Doc Brown might say, maybe in the future anti-matter will be available in every corner drugstore, but in 2023 it’s a little hard to come by.
