Wouldn’t the economic impacts of 70,000 tons of iridium depend on whose hands it fell into? I mean, are we talking about every country in world getting tons of the stuff, or are we talking about it all of it falling into the De Beers Company’s hands?
With a name like Vader, why am I not surprised? 
Make a bunch of high-end spinning tops?
(video shows a top that spun for > 1 hr – he uses the densest material (tungsten) he could reasonably obtain.)
Brian
Here’s a link showing the metals we mined in 2021, in tons:
How does 70,000 tons compare?
Uranium 48,000 tons
Strontium 360,000 tons
Ok, but 70,000 tons was suppose to be world changing. That should entail at least 20 years of production. What metals are produced in 3,500 ton range?
Bismuth 19,000
Gold 3,000
Mercury 2,300
Tantalum 2,100
Indium 920
Gallium 430
Beryllium 260
Meanwhile, zinc clocks in at 13 million tons per year. The champ is iron at 2.6 billion tons per year. I suspect the analogue would be titanium at 9 million tons per year. So I say our interplanetary villain would require 200 million tons of MacGuffium to be interested.
The numbers from that page are in terms of mine production. That is, raw ore, which is always much less than the metal. Think about it: is there any way that 48,000 tons of uranium metal is mined per year? No chance.
The OP is about 70,000 tons of metal, so it’s not compareable.
70,000 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older, and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t call me, 'cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store!
It seems I’m not the only one who this thread reminds of that song. I was going to suggest that the iridium be brought back in 16 ton loads, since then there’d be a natural theme song for the operation.
Curious, how much payload could a Starship land with?
Starship could land with the entire 70,000 ton load.
Once.
Okay, how much could it land without Unscheduled Payload Distribution?
If you need Starship to go up again, it can return to Earth 100 tons at a time. If it can make it to the parking orbit of the asteroid without needing to be refueled, we’re talking about maybe 2 million per launch at first, but if these things are going up and down regularly that cost will come down to maybe a million.
That puts the LEO to Earth transit cost at about $13/kilo. Which is nothing compared to the market price of Iridium. Iridium sells for roughly $185 per gram currently. Adding 13 cents per gram don’t matter.
I’d take all the iridium and build an iridium condominium as part of my dominion. I would also put a presidium in my iridiun condominium to maintain the equilibrium in my dominion.
Just happened to reread my post and noticed the error. I meant “much more than the metal”, of course.
Agreed: I retract my post.
I searched further for raw metal production, without luck. Even getting rough ratios is hard: US reports individual metal ore mined and metal produced, but the latter includes both domestic and foreign ores. Indeed, US copper output often exceeds US copper ore mined presumably due to foreign ore inputs.