If that’s an impossibly broad question, then what’s the most expensive thing ever bought by an individual person?
It’s probably impossibly broad, because you would have answers like, “NASA’s mission to the Moon” or “World War II”.
I don’t have an answer with regard to something bought by an individual but it is probably some piece of real estate, like this estate valued at $122M. I should add that is for sale, but not what someone has already paid.
One arab prince has recently placed an order for a new Airbus which is a “mere” $300 million.
Also, Roman Abramovich has ordered a 483-foot yacht called the Eclipse that’s expected to cost over $300 million. So it’s roughly as expensive as that private Airbus A380.
According to NASA’s Human Space Flight web site FAQ, Endeavor (the newest shuttle) cost @ $1.7 billion.
Yes, but that wasn’t purchased by an individual person, as specified in the OP.
>It’s probably impossibly broad, because you would have answers like, “NASA’s mission to the Moon”…
I don’t think this question is impossibly broad, and neither did one of the editions of the Guiness Book of World Records, which IIRC said the most expensive thing ever bought was, in fact, the Apollo program, at IIRC $25,000,000,000 (in the more valuable dollars of some year around that time like 1960 ot 1970).
I think that this doesn’t meet my definition of ‘bought’. Paying for something to be built isn’t the same as buying it. There needs to be a clearly defined seller who takes receipt of all the money, I would think.
For similar reasons, endeavours like wars and the Apollo mission aren’t ‘bought’ in my opinion.
An Indian business man is building his own high-rise for his private residence, with the first 27 floors as reserved parking for his auto collection.
I believe the price is in the multi-billions.
There is this dingy.
How would the Alaska or Louisiana purchase measure up, adjusted for inflation?
And there’s two ways to look at this question – what would the price paid for Alaska or the Louisiana Territory be if rendered in 2008 dollars? or, What is the actual value of the state of Alaska, and of the states and parts-of-states included in the Louisiana Purchase, according to current appraisals? Likewise, what is the current total appraised value of New York County, NY (original price $24 in beads)? One or the other probably constitutes the biggest bargain in history by those standards.
Interpreting “thing” relatively broadly, there have been several purchases of sports teams by individuals that top the $300 million cited above, including one (Manchester United) purported to be worth $1.5 billion.
There are also probably business acquisitions by big dealers (Warren Buffett, The Donald, etc.) that top the $300 million mark.
>Endeavor (the newest shuttle) cost @ $1.7 billion.[…]Paying for something to be built isn’t the same as buying it. There needs to be a clearly defined seller who takes receipt…
NASA doesn’t build shuttles, they pay contractors to. There’s probably a general contractor and various sub contractors in a sort of tree structure relationship. Paying to have a house built probably looks pretty similar, except for the scale of it all. When you buy a house, in fact, there seem to be all kinds of people with jobs you never heard of that have their hands out. But, the buyer is buying the house, even though it’s not a single line item rung up on a cash register.
Right, but it didn’t become a house until labor and design were applied to make it into a house. This is why it is offered on the open market as a house at the price of a house and not as a pile of building materials at the cost of building materials. You might be able to make this argument for a prefab home, but not a conventional one.
And I don’t know what you’re talking about with ‘people with their hands out’. Maybe if you’re building your own, but not buying an already bought house. Anyone with their hand out is just servicing the transaction (appraiser, realtor, closing attorney, etc).
If it wasn’t offered for sale by a seller, and purchased by a buyer, then it was not “bought”. This should at least help figure out absurd proposals from reasonable ones.
In the case of government spacecraft, it’s rather hard to say, as (IIRC) they are designed and fabricated by a contractor like Lockheed and delivered as nearly complete assemblages. If not for this I would not agree that they could be considered ‘bought’.
I’ll wait for the version with a golf course.
I’ll wait for the version of the saloon that has diamond encrusted spittoons for the discrimating guest.
A yacht with a golf course already exists. Sort of. In one of those articles describing the largest yachts in the world, the author described a yacht with a floating golf course. The crew members anchor eighteen buoys near the yacht. Each player drives a ball towards each buoy (each representing one of the golf holes), and the one whose ball is closest wins that hole. The golf balls are designed to float and a crew member in a dinghy retrieves the balls after the game is over.
I think the distinction that paying for something to be built isn’t the same as buying something is simply absurd. Of course it is being bought: there’s an exchange of money, a product, and a delivery. And I’d think that the CVN-77, the newest aircraft carrier, may rank up there in terms of the most expensive single tangible thing: the price tag was about $4.5 billion.
If we consider things that are a little more abstract, but certainly come with tangibles, then AOL buying Time-Warner for $162 billion or so should be considered.
But by the terms of the OP, he specifies that the thing has to be bought by an individual person, not a government or a corporation. In which case, I think the billion dollar residence being built by the afore-mentioned Indian tycoon certainly is in the running. Link.
I don’t.
“Buying” implies that an object was at one time owned by entity A, then at a later time ownership was transferred to entity B in exchange for money. An entity might be a human being, a government or a corporation, for instance.
If you buy a house, the house you get was once owned by someone else. If you have people build a house for you, you are the owner from start to finish.
It’s true that you have to pay people along the way for their work. You have to pay an architect to design the house, and pay for building supplies, and pay for people to do the actual building. But that involves numerous individual acts of purchasing. You are buying a lot of different things from different people at different times. It is not the same as buying a house as a single thing.