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.
Roads.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/23cpr/appendixa.cfm
Roads have an unbelievable cost when you really start to put the numbers together. A lane mile of a new interstate on rolling terrain costs 6.2 million in 2025 $. Keep in mind that is only a lane mile, so for 2 lanes in each direction, it’s $25 million per mile. Multiply that by the 49k miles of interstate, and you have a (super rough) estimate cost of 1.2 trillion to construct it today. Even resurfacing those roads is ~1/10 the cost, which is still a lot of money.
Ignoring interstates and looking at really run of the mill arterial is still staggering.
Picking a random square farming county, McPherson county, KS is an easy example. It is 30 miles by 30 miles, with a paved arterial every mile (ignoring towns). Thats 3600 lane miles. At $3.6 million per lane mile, that’s ~$13 billion to costruct the roads in a county with a population of 30,000, or $432,000 per person.
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.
DIY race car, street legal. ~$55k for the base car, $30k for engine and transmission. Then add all the rest for things like tires ($2k) and whatever further refinements you’d want as an owner. All told, probably $110k DIY minimum. Play with your choices here. Cheaper than any modern supercar, even the used ones.
For shits and giggles I would build out custom helicopters at sites like this;
https://www.hillhelicopters.com/configurator/0
typically they end cost would be 1.5 million.
Not as expensive as I would have thought
I agree.
Also I would als built them out with all the bells and whistles. I suspect you could build one for less.
Private jet aircraft. They are very expensive to buy (say from US$ 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.
If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.
Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.
At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).
At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.
The telling thing about these kind of questions isn’t so much how much does a mega yacht cost or something but its that those are the things people are picking out because they are visible.
The invisible stuff or the things that go along with these huge purchases are often times not that far off in price from the initial purchase.
The stone slabs in these mega house kitchens cost as much as some houses, the earrings bought and worn once at an event could pay for your whole family to go to college, the custom shoes they wear have their own rooms and cost as much as a car.
What do you think the electric bill for a 20,000 sqft house is? Do you think the owner cares what that impact is monetarily or on the climate? If they do solar, how much do you think that setup cost? Do you think the morality of these purchases ever crosses their minds?
I grew up wanting a fast car and lots of powersports toys, now that I am in a position to afford some (small amount) of that, I find myself thinking more that its not right to spend on those kind of activities now due to the impact on the environment. I am leaning more and more towards becoming a vegetarian because of how the food industry impacts the lives of the people and animals it uses. Do the mega wealthy or even the top 30% think about that when they spend their money? Completely ignoring the aspect of how they got their money which is a whole other thing in and of itself.
Do you think the morality of these purchases ever crosses their minds?
No. Those gilded ghouls don’t concern themselves with petty things like morality. They are barely even human anymore.
The invisible stuff or the things that go along with these huge purchases are often times not that far off in price from the initial purchase.
I work for a company that makes a specific accessory for yachts. Some orders we get depending on the configuration can cost as much as a car for just one of them… These people will order 4+ in one go. This is an accessory to the yacht, something you sit on… It’s crazy
That is a deep fundamental problem in our culture. Not recognizing the immorality, even grossness, of casually weilding the kind of sums of money that can buy and sell other people.
And it’s relative, and many of us are guilty of it, and even if we recognize it, most off us can say, well I’m not as bad as those people, pointing to those above us. Most westerners, even fairly poor ones, are in that position wrt people in other parts of the world.
I’m neither blaming anyone, nor letting anyone (including myself) of the hook. That’s beside the point. We need to change our culture’s understanding of this. How, idk, except that every time we can point at it and say WTF!?! we should.
I grew up wanting a fast car and lots of powersports toys, now that I am in a position to afford some (small amount) of that, I find myself thinking more that its not right to spend on those kind of activities now due to the impact on the environment.
Exactly, as I begin to be able to afford some smaller luxuries (say, a higher-end computer part or an extra monitor) I realize that I morally object to many luxuries because of their environmental cost, e-waste, and thinking of better uses for that money.
I do believe there’s some truth to the slogan of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” but luxuries are so often just egregious and repulsive.
I know someone who genuinely considered buying a submarine
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/
Data centers cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Now imagine building a data center for some stupid fad tech, then when you’re done and ready to bring it up, everyone has moved on from the fad.
Oh and that figure doesn’t include the actual servers themselves. Considering my two production quality rack mount servers were about $5,000 each, if you put 20,000 of those in your data center (a very small amount, but the kind of servers in the same data center vary wildly, so I’m thinking a fleet of these would be only part of the data center), that’d be another $100,000,000.
my two production quality rack mount servers were about $5,000 each
Now, price Nvidia H200s. (Spoiler: about $35K)
Oh boy. Yeah, adding graphics/AI stuff is a whole different ballpark of expensive.
That’s definitely on the low end, at my employer we spend around 20k per server, that’s for 256 cores, 2tb of ram and some nvme.
Yeah, I didn’t need a lot of RAM, which is why they were relatively cheap. They’re compute heavy, with 128 cores, 256GB RAM, and 4TB NVMe. Compute heavy is a relatively common use case for servers though.
Yachts. They go for 600 million dollars and maybe more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azzam_(2013_yacht)
If I’m reading that correctly, it also comes with a mini-submarine.
At an estimated cost of $605 million, the ship cost approximately $100 million more than the third-largest private motor yacht, Eclipse.
The luxyachts maintenance calculator suggests it could be $10-20 million per year just to maintain it.
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.My first car was $12k USD off the lot.
I just bought a new car after nearly two decades of my first and it was $42k. It’s not even anywhere near upper end, it’s one of the most basic daily drivers there are.
I believe the best selling chevy right now is a 19k tiny suv. Basically the cheapest thing on the lot.
What I heard is that we are going to have a huge problem with car insurance soon. A fender bender cost 10k, the current premiums are not covering enough of the expenses - so we can expect insurance prices to double soon.I’ve never been in a single accident and drive a basic compact sedan I bought new off the lot 10 years ago. I could buy it used today, with current mileage for about the same price I paid new. I’ve paid about half the initial purchase price in insurance premiums.
Being a good driver sucks, but it’s kind of like healthcare where…wait a minute I’m healthy and getting fucked there too. As I age I’m going to street race and try to gain as much weight as I can.
Mega-yachts.
Here is a yacht buying/selling website with a filter for mega-yachts: https://www.yachtworld.com/boats-for-sale/type-power/class-power-mega/
The most expensive ones listed there are in the lower hundreds of millions (US$). 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 https://www.superyachtshipping.com/
yo dawg i herd u liek boats so we put yo boat on a boat so you can ride while you ride
Ooh this is a good one, especially considering that in order to have a yacht you also have to hire a whole crew and pay for docking it.
The most expensive thing ever built and maintained is the International Space Station. At $160B over its lifetime, the ISS is a model for the excessively wealthy.
True, it is not primed for self-sustaining flight, and the quarters are very cramped, but a space-faring über-rich individual has to have a Plan B in case they’re not on the same continent as one of their “end of days” bunkers. Those start at $1 million and can run upwards of $300 million.
About the same time as the first private space station comes into service, we will also find that the rocket and tandem-independent space shuttle will also be feasible. Necessity is the mother of invention.
