The net worth of people standing on the sq. km. do not count in the value of that land, so Davos would not be the answer.
One problem with the question is that some things are extremely valuable, but they don’t have a dollar amount we can stick on them. For example, a sq. km. including the White House and Washington Monument plus whatever other monument can be included (not sure if the Lincoln Memorial is close enough) would be more valuable that all the gold in Ft Knox, but no one could put a price tag on it.
Just throwing in that I have visited the gold vault at the New York Fed, and have been told by the people who ran the guided tour that, indeed, that vault is the world’s largest accumulation of gold in a single location. Here is more information, from the Fed itself, about the vault.
Fun fact: The vault is so deep underneath street level that, when you’re in there, you can hear the subway trains go past above you.
I hadn’t considered that. Fort Knox holds more than half of the gold belonging to the United States government, but the Fed holds more gold in total because it handles so many accounts. A square kilometer of Manhattan’s absurdly value property which included the gold vault would probably clinch it.
Manhattan… are we considering the real estate value, or the value including buildings already constructed? Obviously, a building full of million-dollar condos (or office space) is worth a lot more than the square footage of real estate, which is what is usually discussed in terms of “how valuable is…”
Then we add in contents of buildings. And vaults. Not just the Fed, there are plenty of other vaults within spitting distance of Wall St. I imagine. (Recall the news item about the gold stored in the WTC.) Can we stretch it to include the diamond district?
If we admit factories, then surely the record holder in that category must be a semiconductor (i.e., chip) foundry. Those are freaking expensive, owing to the highly controlled ultra-pure environment integrated circuits are manufactured in. The most modern ones, clustered in Taiwan, easily clock in at a two-digit billion dollar amount.
As for sheer land value, I wouldn’t be so sure that the record holder must be Manhattan. During the Japanese real estate bubble of the 1990s, the land on which the Imperial Palace in Tokyo lies was famously more valuable than all of California. That bubble has long burst, but other Asian cities may have taken over that top spot; FWIW, the Guinness Book of World Records lists a plot that was sold in Hong Kong in 2017 as the most expensive plot of land in the world, at $96,896 per square foot.
I’m going to take the question to suppose being somehow able to get to and separate out all the ingredients. In this case, I’d pick any equatorial segment, because it’d be the tallest and have the most stuff. If I had the time to study the shape of the earth and its core, I’d pick in particular the one with the most core, which I’m gonna guess is the tallest one.
The biggest value would be the heavy metal minerals. Highly valuable precious metals settle to the core, so most of the gold, iridium, platinum, osmium, rhodium, and so forth, are down there. Flooding the market with these would drive down their price, sure, but the lot we’re flooding it with would still be very valuable. In fact each of these would become viable engineering materials, and each has its engineering charms! Streets paved with gold would last forever, as just one example.
If the OP does not suppose this, then, I guess, just the highest real estate value, or perhaps the land that Fort Knox is on. Everything far below doesn’t count, for the same reason that a deed to the entire mantle and core of the Earth is practically worthless.
I always feel bad when an OP asks an interesting question and people sidetrack the discussion without answering in good faith. Instead they just try to upstage the OP. One might sincerely wonder whether this was a question about natural resources or whether the OP meant to include real estate and perhaps that would have been a question worth asking. I’d be willing to bet he didn’t mean “where do people store a bunch of valuable stuff close together?” If that’s what an ordinary speaker of English meant, I expect they would have phrased the question differently and wouldn’t have focused on the distance to the core and to the edge of the atmosphere since that’s all going to be largely irrelevant.
Except that the OP, @MorrisCody, posted later along those lines, “I would guess the square meter surrounding either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre.”
Gold is too soft for wheels, it seems to me, soon you’d have ruts. You would rather want platinum for that. Or titanium. At least I would. Also looks cooler, not like a 3rd-World-chieftain’s toilet.
This is FQ. It’s impossible to give a factual answer or even a reasonable speculative answer (beyond those already given about the equator and about market saturation of minerals) about the value of resources extending to the earth’s core. It is possible to use available data to comment on concentrations of existing value, and the discussion has been interesting and informative.
What he’s saying is that the Boeing factory produces a steady revenue stream, so that if you owned that and you got that revenue stream, that might be worth more over time than somewhere with some sort of finite natural resources or high real estate values.
Going with the spirit of the OP, are there any cities situated over valuable mineral-type resources? That might be the double-whammy of both human-generated value and natural value to make it very valuable.