Lets see how many of these we can come up with.
I know that the B-2 Spirit costs well over $1 billion.
Lets keep the list to single items. Anything else?
A Nimitz class aircraft carrier clocks in at about 4 billion dollars. The newest Seawolf and Virginia class submarines cost about 2 billion each. The Hibernia offshore oil platform cost 5.8 billion dollars. Kansai International airport cost 15 billion to construct.
In recent history, You Tube.
Upon re-reading the OP, that reference was probably out of the scope of “item”.
Half of the San Francisco to Oakland url=http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/bay_bridge/bbhist.htm] bay bridge is now up to $8.3 billion.
Half of the San Francisco to Oakland bay bridge is now up to $8.3 billion.
My dignity can be had for a cool billion.
Someone wanna take me up on the offer?
Please?
Maybe the space shuttle?
You could start with a list of major structures including buildings, bridges and dams.
Do you want to limit this somehow, like things that are designed to be mobile?
Maybe someone could try to come up with something not owned by any Government?
Pearson Airport is owned by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. I think that’s a corporation, not a government. and they’re just getting through a 4-5-billion rebuilding program. (Yes, our governments say things like the Corporation of the Town of Bancroft, but that’s not the same.)
Individual items, though? Oil rigs? The presidential plane? (How much do the modifications cost to a base 747?) An irreplaceable piece of art, like the Mona Lisa?
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium has cost over $1 billion.
According to Unca Cece, 1 gram of californium-252 would be worth $1 billion.
Many casinos here in Las Vegas (Bellagio, Wynn and the Venetian for example) all cost north of a billion dollars to build.
(BTW, for Europeans reading this, a billion in the US is 1,000,000,000. I mention this as in Germany at least, a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 known as a trillion in US. That is why Germans are sometimes shocked to hear billion bantered about in English as though it were pocket change.)
At 50 cents a can, 2,000,000,001 cans of Coca-Cola.
No, but seriously, Three Gorges Dam in China is - at the very, possibly, unthinkably lowest - $25 billion, and a much more realistic figure is up around $100 billion.
Donald Trump and Melania Knauss.
I hear they’re quite the item.
I could probably get a billion for about a dozen kg of Pu-239.
That, or about 450 metric tons of Saffron. That’s equivilant to about all the Saffron produced on the planet, over a year and a half. (You couldn’t blow the Saffron up and start a genocidal world war, though—but I suppose you could buy a lot of Saffron, then blow up the spice that you didn’t own, and drive up the value of your own stock dramatically. Which is kind of cool. I guess.)
This has long interested me, not because of what one country or another does or does not do, but because, as I think Asimov once said, imagine if “a hundred” meant 1000 in Britain and 100 in the US.
At 1.8 billion dollars per week, one billion dollars will buy almost (but not quite) 4 days of US presence in Iraq.