What Is the Most Expensive Material on Earth—and Why?
Gold is expensive. Diamonds can be expensive. Certain rare radioactive elements can cost millions or even billions of dollars per gram.
But none of them comes close to the substance usually described as the most expensive material on Earth.
That substance is antimatter.
Depending on how production costs are calculated, estimates for producing one gram of antimatter have reached tens of trillions of dollars and, in some analyses, considerably more. A widely cited NASA study estimated the cost of producing one gram of antiprotons at about $62.5 trillion using the technology and production efficiency available at the time.
That number is so large that comparing antimatter with gold almost becomes meaningless.
The reason is not that antimatter is sitting somewhere underground in an incredibly rare mine. Scientists cannot simply discover a kilogram of it and bring it to the surface. Antimatter has to be created artificially, particle by particle, using enormous amounts of energy and some of the most sophisticated scientific equipment ever constructed.
Even after scientists create it, another problem begins: antimatter cannot touch ordinary matter.
If it does, both annihilate.
That means the most expensive material on Earth is also one of the hardest substances humanity has ever tried to manufacture, collect, store and transport.
Most Expensive Material on Earth at a Glance
| Material | Approximate Cost or Status | Why It Is Expensive |
|---|---|---|
| Antimatter | Historical estimates: tens of trillions of dollars per gram or higher | Extremely inefficient artificial production and extraordinary storage difficulty |
| Rare research radioisotopes | Some exceed $10 billion per gram equivalent | Nuclear-reactor production, tiny supply and difficult separation |
| Californium-252 | Extremely expensive and sold in microgram quantities | Complex reactor production and radiochemical processing |
| High-quality diamonds | Price varies enormously | Rarity, quality, cutting and market demand |
| Gold | Market-traded commodity | Scarcity, mining and global demand |
| Platinum-group metals | High but market-dependent | Geological rarity and difficult extraction |
The table also exposes an important issue.
Antimatter does not really have a normal price per gram because there is no warehouse selling grams of it. The figures are production-cost estimates.
That distinction is essential to answering what the most expensive material on Earth actually is.
1. What Exactly Is Antimatter?
Nearly every ordinary particle has an antimatter counterpart.
An electron has a corresponding antiparticle called a positron. A proton has an antiproton.
The antiparticle has the same mass as the normal particle but opposite values for certain properties, such as electric charge.
A normal hydrogen atom consists of a positively charged proton with a negatively charged electron.
Antihydrogen reverses that structure. It consists of a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron.
CERN operates a dedicated Antimatter Factory where researchers create and study these particles to investigate fundamental questions about physics.
Antimatter is therefore not imaginary science-fiction material. It is real and routinely produced in tiny quantities in physics laboratories.
The extraordinary difficulty lies in producing enough of it to become anything resembling an ordinary material sample.
2. Why Is Antimatter the Most Expensive Material on Earth?
To understand the cost, imagine trying to manufacture something with an unbelievably inefficient machine.
You put enormous amounts of electricity and infrastructure into the process. Almost everything you produce is useless. Only an extremely small fraction becomes the material you actually want.
Antimatter production works somewhat like that.
At CERN, scientists accelerate ordinary protons to high energies and smash them into a metal target. The collisions produce many secondary particles, including antiprotons.
Only some antiprotons have suitable properties for collection.
They then have to be focused, slowed and trapped before scientists can use them.
This extremely inefficient production chain is the central reason antimatter qualifies as the most expensive material on Earth.
The equipment needed to create it includes accelerators, powerful magnets, vacuum systems, cooling equipment, detectors, sophisticated electronics and entire teams of scientists and engineers.
You are not paying for a raw material.
You are effectively paying for an enormous scientific infrastructure capable of creating an almost impossibly small quantity of particles.
3. Where Did the Famous $62.5 Trillion per Gram Figure Come From?
One of the most commonly repeated figures comes from NASA research into potential antimatter propulsion.
A 1999 NASA technical report estimated that producing one gram of antiprotons using the available infrastructure would cost approximately:
$62.5 trillion.
NASA — Antimatter Production for Near-Term Propulsion Applications
That does not mean NASA offered to sell antimatter for $62.5 trillion per gram.
The number represented an estimated production cost.
Later NASA material used figures around $100 trillion per gram, depending on assumptions and production technology.
Other calculations have produced still higher numbers.
This is why it is safer to say the most expensive material on Earth would cost tens of trillions of dollars per gram or potentially much more to manufacture, rather than pretending that one precise universal market price exists.
The technology continues improving, so production-cost estimates can change.
But the fundamental conclusion does not.
Antimatter remains extraordinarily far from economical mass production.
4. Humanity Cannot Produce Anything Close to One Gram
The phrase “one gram of antimatter” sounds as though scientists might have a tiny container somewhere holding that amount.
They do not.
Humanity’s production capability is unimaginably smaller.
CERN says its Antimatter Factory can deliver roughly 400 million antiprotons per hour to experiments, with experiments able to capture only part of that output.
That sounds like a huge number until you remember how little an individual antiproton weighs.
CERN estimates that even if the Antimatter Factory operated continuously for an entire year, the total antiprotons produced would amount to only around:
3 × 10⁻¹⁶ kilograms.
That is a tiny fraction of a gram.
CERN also notes that current antihydrogen production is microscopic even after decades of technological development.
This is why the most expensive material on Earth is not being manufactured in jewelry-sized pieces.
It is being studied atom by atom and particle by particle.
5. Antimatter Production Is Getting Better
Scientists are improving the process.
In November 2025, CERN announced a major breakthrough in antihydrogen production.
Researchers in the ALPHA experiment developed a new cooling method that increased the production rate substantially. The team reported producing more than 15,000 antihydrogen atoms within hours, an enormous improvement compared with earlier experimental capabilities.
CERN — Breakthrough in Antimatter Production
That sounds impressive—and scientifically it is.
But 15,000 atoms still weigh practically nothing on an everyday scale.
The breakthrough therefore does not mean the most expensive material on Earth is about to become commercially affordable.
It means scientists can perform much better experiments with larger numbers of anti-atoms.
There is an enormous distance between making tens of thousands of atoms and producing one visible gram.
6. Producing Antimatter Is Only Half the Problem
Suppose you could somehow manufacture a useful amount.
Now you have to store it.
That creates another extraordinary challenge.
Normal objects are made of matter.
Containers are matter.
Laboratory walls are matter.
Air molecules are matter.
The moment antimatter touches corresponding normal matter, annihilation occurs.
So you cannot simply put antimatter into:
a glass bottle;
a steel box;
a plastic container.
Instead, researchers have to prevent the particles from physically touching the container.
CERN uses electromagnetic trapping systems and extremely high vacuum conditions to hold charged antimatter such as antiprotons.
The BASE experiment has demonstrated antiproton storage lasting more than a year under extraordinarily controlled conditions.
That storage challenge contributes to why antimatter remains the most expensive material on Earth.
7. Antihydrogen Is Even Harder to Trap
Antiprotons carry electrical charge.
That means scientists can manipulate them with electric and magnetic fields.
Antihydrogen is electrically neutral.
That makes containment much more difficult.
Researchers rely on antihydrogen’s weak magnetic properties and carefully designed magnetic traps.
CERN’s ALPHA experiment famously demonstrated the ability to trap antihydrogen so scientists could study its properties instead of watching it immediately hit ordinary matter and disappear.
CERN ALPHA — Trapped Antihydrogen
The entire exercise illustrates why a simple statement such as “antimatter costs $X per gram” hides most of the story.
The cost is not just creation.
It is creation, slowing, capture, cooling, storage and measurement.
8. Scientists Have Even Started Transporting Antimatter
For decades, transporting antimatter sounded like pure science fiction.
That is beginning to change—but only at microscopic scales.
In 2026, CERN’s BASE-STEP project demonstrated the transport of trapped antiprotons in a specially designed portable system.
The experiment used a sophisticated cryogenic Penning trap, powerful superconducting magnets and specialized equipment.
This was not a truck carrying a bottle of antimatter.
It involved only an extraordinarily tiny number of antiprotons.
The News Ink’s NASA Space Technology guide explores similar examples of how technologies that sound futuristic can become real through decades of incremental scientific development.
Antimatter transport is technically becoming possible.
Transporting meaningful macroscopic quantities remains a completely different challenge.
9. What Happens When Antimatter Touches Matter?
They annihilate.
The mass of the matter and antimatter is converted into other forms of energy and particles according to Einstein’s famous relationship:
E = mc²
Antimatter is therefore interesting as an incredibly energy-dense theoretical fuel.
If one gram of antimatter met one gram of ordinary matter, the total two grams of mass involved would correspond to roughly:
1.8 × 10¹⁴ joules of energy.
That is approximately equivalent to 43 kilotons of TNT.
For comparison, this is an enormous amount of energy from something whose total combined mass would be only two grams.
This extraordinary energy density is why NASA and other researchers have considered antimatter for futuristic spacecraft propulsion.
The News Ink’s NASA Explained complete guide covers how advanced propulsion research fits into the much larger challenge of exploring distant parts of the Solar System.
However, antimatter is currently terrible as a practical energy source because creating it consumes vastly more energy than humanity could recover from annihilating it.
10. Antimatter Is Not a Giant Battery
The enormous energy released during annihilation creates a common misconception.
Why not manufacture antimatter when electricity is cheap, store it and use it later?
Because current production is extraordinarily inefficient.
You would spend vastly more energy making the antimatter than you would recover from using it.
CERN explicitly notes that humanity cannot currently produce significant quantities and that antimatter would be extremely impractical as an energy source under present technology.
Even all the antiprotons that CERN’s Antimatter Factory could produce continuously over a year represent only a modest amount of annihilation energy.
The most expensive material on Earth is therefore not expensive because it gives us a cheap source of unlimited power.
It is expensive because we are spectacularly inefficient at creating it.
11. Why Does Antimatter Exist at All?
This question leads into one of the biggest mysteries in physics.
The Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter under conditions that scientists are still trying to understand.
If perfectly equal amounts survived and repeatedly annihilated one another, the universe we see today would look very different.
Yet the observable universe is overwhelmingly dominated by matter.
Where did the antimatter go?
Why is there such an imbalance?
Experiments at CERN study tiny differences between matter and antimatter in hopes of understanding this puzzle.
Researchers compare properties such as:
mass;
charge;
spectra;
magnetic behavior;
gravity.
Understanding why matter dominates the universe could reveal physics beyond our current theories.
So the most expensive material on Earth is valuable scientifically not because someone wants to manufacture an expensive object from it but because it could help answer one of the deepest questions in cosmology.
12. Is Antimatter Naturally Found Anywhere?
Small amounts of antimatter can occur naturally.
Certain radioactive processes produce positrons.
High-energy cosmic-ray collisions can also generate antiparticles.
Antimatter can therefore appear in nature without a particle accelerator.
But it does not accumulate into convenient chunks.
An antiparticle moving through ordinary surroundings is likely eventually to encounter matter and annihilate.
CERN notes that antimatter occurs naturally mainly as individual particles generated in processes such as cosmic-ray and nuclear interactions.
So there are not hidden antimatter rocks waiting to be mined.
That is another major difference between antimatter and conventional valuable materials.
Gold is expensive partly because locating and extracting concentrated deposits is difficult.
Antimatter is expensive because we generally have to manufacture the particles ourselves.
13. What Is the Most Expensive Material You Could More Realistically Obtain?
This is where the answer becomes more nuanced.
If someone asks for the most expensive material on Earth that is genuinely produced and distributed in measurable quantities, specialized radioactive isotopes become more useful comparisons.
The U.S. Department of Energy says certain rare isotopes used in scientific research can cost more than $10,000 per microgram.
That is equivalent to:
more than $10 billion per gram.
U.S. Department of Energy — Rare Isotope Research
Unlike a hypothetical gram of antimatter, these isotopes can actually exist in laboratory quantities large enough to handle chemically.
They are still extremely rare and tightly controlled.
14. Californium-252 Is One of the Most Famous Expensive Isotopes
Californium is a synthetic radioactive element.
One isotope, californium-252, is particularly valuable because it emits large numbers of neutrons.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the major Western producer of Cf-252 and reports producing more than 70% of the world’s supply.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Isotopes
Californium-252 has applications including:
nuclear reactor startup;
materials analysis;
oil and gas well logging;
scientific research.
The National Isotope Development Center lists Cf-252 as being sold in microgram quantities, reflecting how rare and specialized it is.
Unlike antimatter, californium can be placed into physical forms and transported under specialized nuclear-material controls.
That makes it a much more realistic example of an extremely expensive substance.
15. Why Is Californium So Expensive?
You cannot simply mine californium from ordinary rocks.
It has to be manufactured.
Producing Cf-252 requires exposing heavy target materials to intense neutron radiation inside specialized nuclear reactors. Through repeated nuclear reactions and radioactive transformations, heavier nuclei are gradually created.
After irradiation, scientists have to perform extremely difficult chemical separation and purification.
Oak Ridge uses highly specialized facilities, including the High Flux Isotope Reactor and radiochemical infrastructure, for this purpose.
The process can take years.
The resulting quantities are tiny.
The material is also highly radioactive, requiring remote handling and heavily controlled facilities.
These factors make californium extremely expensive—but still nowhere near the theoretical production cost associated with the most expensive material on Earth, antimatter.
16. Viral Lists Often Give Misleading Prices for Californium
You may have seen websites claiming:
Californium costs $27 million per gram.
That number has historical roots.
An Oak Ridge publication from 1988 described californium-252 at about $27 million per gram at that time.
But presenting that old number as a universal 2026 retail price is misleading.
Modern isotope sales depend on quantity, form, purity, availability, licensing and production arrangements.
Some materials may require customers to request quotes rather than displaying an ordinary consumer price.
This is why articles about the most expensive material on Earth should be careful with viral price lists.
A laboratory isotope is not traded like gold.
And antimatter is even further removed from an ordinary commodity market.
17. Why Isn’t Diamond the Most Expensive Material?
Diamonds are among the world’s most famous valuable materials, but their pricing works very differently.
A diamond’s value depends on characteristics including:
carat weight;
cut;
clarity;
color;
rarity;
origin.
Exceptionally rare diamonds can sell for extraordinary amounts at auction.
But ordinary diamonds are produced and sold in large enough quantities to have an established commercial market.
Antimatter has no comparable retail market.
That distinction matters when discussing the most expensive material on Earth.
The price of a diamond comes largely from scarcity, quality, labor and demand.
The estimated cost of antimatter comes from the technological difficulty of manufacturing it at all.
The News Ink’s analysis of luxury handbag prices shows a related economic principle: an object’s selling price does not necessarily equal the physical cost of the materials inside it.
18. Gold Is Valuable but Cheap Compared With Antimatter
Gold feels expensive because people encounter it in jewelry, financial markets and investment products.
But humanity mines gold by the tonne.
That makes it completely different from antimatter.
Mining companies can:
find deposits;
extract ore;
crush rock;
chemically separate gold;
refine it;
sell standardized bars.
None of this is cheap.
But the processes operate at industrial scale.
Antimatter production operates at something closer to the individual-particle scale.
Even if gold became ten or one hundred times more expensive, it would remain nowhere near historical antimatter-production estimates.
That shows just how unusual the most expensive material on Earth really is.
19. Your Smartphone Contains Valuable Materials Too
Expensive materials are not limited to scientific laboratories.
Modern electronics contain many valuable metals and specialized materials.
A smartphone can include:
gold;
copper;
lithium;
cobalt;
nickel;
rare-earth elements.
Each phone contains relatively small quantities, but billions of devices create a significant material resource.
The News Ink’s guide to what happens to old smartphones explains how recyclers can recover some of these materials after devices reach the end of their useful life.
That process is sometimes described as urban mining.
It provides an interesting contrast with antimatter.
Smartphone metals are valuable partly because Earth contains limited accessible deposits.
Antimatter is valuable because practically none is available for collection at all.
20. Material Science Often Has to Balance Cost Against Performance
The most expensive material is rarely automatically the most useful one.
Engineers care about properties such as:
strength;
weight;
conductivity;
temperature resistance;
durability;
availability;
manufacturing cost.
A material that costs billions of dollars per gram is useless for ordinary manufacturing regardless of how scientifically interesting it is.
This is why engineers often spend years finding affordable materials that provide good enough performance at industrial scale.
The News Ink’s article explaining smartphone battery life shows this trade-off in practice. Researchers could imagine exotic battery chemistries with much greater energy density, but a commercial battery also has to be safe, durable, affordable and manufacturable millions of times.
Materials engineering is therefore rarely a competition to find the rarest substance.
It is a competition to find the best practical compromise.
21. Recycling Can Sometimes Be More Valuable Than Finding New Material
Modern technology contains an enormous amount of already-refined material.
That creates a circular-economy opportunity.
Instead of continuously extracting new resources, manufacturers can recover:
metals;
electronics;
battery materials;
structural components.
The News Ink’s discussion of whether a circular laptop could last 20 years explains why repair and reuse can often preserve more value than immediately breaking devices down into raw material.
This perspective matters when thinking about expensive substances.
Price is partly about how difficult a resource is to obtain.
If society can recover valuable materials that have already been mined and refined, their useful life can be extended without repeating the entire extraction process.
Antimatter offers essentially none of this convenience.
Once antimatter annihilates, you cannot simply recycle the original antiparticles.
22. Could Antimatter Ever Become Much Cheaper?
Yes, at least theoretically.
Production methods could improve.
Particle accelerators could become more efficient.
Capture rates could increase.
Storage technology could improve.
Specialized facilities might produce antimatter more effectively than research accelerators designed for many other purposes.
Historical NASA studies considered how dedicated production infrastructure might dramatically reduce the effective production cost.
But there is an enormous difference between:
cheaper antimatter
and
cheap antimatter.
Reducing a theoretical $60 trillion-per-gram production cost by a factor of 1,000 would still leave the material fantastically expensive.
That is why antimatter propulsion remains far beyond ordinary engineering.
23. Why Would NASA Ever Want Antimatter?
The answer is energy density.
Spacecraft face a fundamental problem: carrying fuel adds mass.
More mass requires more propulsion.
That can require more fuel.
Antimatter potentially offers an enormous amount of energy from extremely little mass.
NASA researchers have therefore examined concepts where antimatter might directly power propulsion or trigger other high-energy reactions.
The News Ink’s NASA Space Technology guide explores why propulsion is one of the hardest limits in deep-space exploration.
Chemical rockets are excellent for leaving Earth.
Traveling rapidly across the outer Solar System—or someday toward another star—creates a much more demanding energy problem.
Antimatter is scientifically fascinating because its energy density is enormous.
The cost and storage problems currently overwhelm that advantage.
24. Could One Gram of Antimatter Destroy a City?
This question appears frequently because antimatter is associated with enormous energy.
One gram of antimatter annihilating completely with one gram of ordinary matter would release about 1.8 × 10¹⁴ joules, equivalent to roughly 43 kilotons of TNT.
That is a very large amount of energy.
But the hypothetical should not be confused with current capability.
CERN is producing quantities so tiny that even a complete accidental loss from existing experimental traps would release negligible energy.
CERN specifically notes that the quantities involved in current antimatter transport experiments are not remotely comparable to a weapon-scale energy source.
Humanity is extraordinarily far from storing grams of antimatter.
So the most expensive material on Earth is not sitting in laboratories as a giant explosion risk.
There simply is nowhere near enough of it.
25. Why Does Antimatter Vanish When It Touches Matter?
The word “annihilation” can sound as though matter simply disappears into nothing.
That is not what physics says.
When a particle and corresponding antiparticle interact, their mass and energy are transformed into other particles and radiation while fundamental conservation laws still apply.
For example, antiproton-proton annihilation can produce energetic secondary particles.
Electron-positron annihilation commonly produces photons.
The original particles disappear as those specific particles, but energy is conserved.
This conversion efficiency is why antimatter is so attractive theoretically for propulsion.
Almost all of the available rest-mass energy can participate in the reaction.
Chemical fuels convert only a tiny fraction of their mass into usable energy.
26. Why Scientists Study Something So Expensive
If antimatter has no practical consumer use today, why spend money studying it?
Because fundamental science often investigates nature before obvious applications exist.
Scientists use antimatter to test whether the laws of physics treat matter and antimatter exactly as expected.
They can compare hydrogen and antihydrogen.
They can measure how antimatter responds to gravity.
They can compare particle properties with extraordinary precision.
CERN’s antimatter experiments are therefore not factories attempting to manufacture a commercial commodity.
They are precision physics laboratories.
The most expensive material on Earth may never become something ordinary people buy.
Its value today lies in what it can teach us about the universe.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most expensive material on Earth?
Antimatter is generally considered the most expensive material on Earth when comparing estimated production costs. Historical NASA calculations placed antiproton production in the tens of trillions of dollars per gram, while other estimates have been higher.
How much does one gram of antimatter cost?
There is no actual retail price because one gram has never been produced or offered for sale. A widely cited 1999 NASA estimate placed one gram of antiprotons at roughly $62.5 trillion under then-current production conditions.
Why is antimatter so expensive?
Antimatter must be created in high-energy particle collisions, captured from enormous numbers of unwanted particles, slowed, cooled and then stored without touching ordinary matter. The production process is extremely inefficient.
Has one gram of antimatter ever been made?
No. Humanity has produced quantities vastly smaller than one gram. CERN currently creates and traps antimatter only in microscopic particle quantities.
Where is antimatter made?
CERN operates the world’s best-known dedicated antimatter research facility, the Antimatter Factory, where experiments use antiprotons and antihydrogen.
Can antimatter be stored?
Yes, but only in tiny quantities using specialized electromagnetic or magnetic traps and extremely high vacuum conditions.
What happens if antimatter touches matter?
The particles annihilate, converting their mass into other forms of energy and particles.
Is antimatter dangerous?
Any substantial macroscopic quantity would contain enormous potential annihilation energy. However, current laboratory quantities are so microscopic that they do not represent the science-fiction-scale danger often imagined.
Is californium more expensive than antimatter?
No when comparing estimated production cost per gram. Californium is extraordinarily expensive, but antimatter-production estimates are many orders of magnitude higher.
What is californium-252 used for?
Californium-252 is a powerful neutron source used for applications including nuclear-reactor startup, scientific research and analysis of materials and geological formations.
Can I buy antimatter?
Not like a normal material. Antimatter is produced for specialized scientific research and is not available as a normal commercial product.
Is diamond the most expensive material?
No. Exceptional diamonds can be extremely valuable, but their prices remain tiny compared with estimates for manufacturing antimatter.
Is antimatter found naturally?
Individual antiparticles can form naturally through processes including cosmic-ray interactions and some radioactive decays, but useful macroscopic quantities do not accumulate naturally on Earth.
Could antimatter power a spacecraft?
In theory, antimatter’s enormous energy density makes it interesting for advanced propulsion. In practice, present production rates, costs and storage difficulties make large-scale antimatter propulsion unrealistic.
The Most Expensive Material on Earth Is Expensive Because We Can Barely Make It
Most valuable materials follow a familiar economic story.
They exist somewhere.
People have to find them.
Extract them.
Process them.
Transport them.
The harder that process becomes and the more people want the material, the higher the price can rise.
Antimatter breaks that pattern.
There is no antimatter mine.
There is no hidden geological deposit containing kilograms of antihydrogen.
Humanity has to create the material ourselves using particle accelerators and enormous scientific facilities.
Then we have to catch the tiny fraction we successfully created.
Then slow it.
Then cool it.
Then keep it floating away from normal matter so it does not immediately annihilate.
That is why antimatter deserves the title of the most expensive material on Earth when production cost is the measure.
The widely repeated figure of $62.5 trillion per gram came from a historical NASA estimate, not a commercial price tag. Other calculations produce different numbers because assumptions about energy costs, accelerator efficiency and dedicated production facilities vary.
But arguing over whether the correct number is $60 trillion, $100 trillion or far higher misses the bigger point.
We cannot currently make one gram.
Not remotely.
Modern antimatter research deals with quantities measured in individual particles and atoms. CERN celebrates major scientific progress when experiments can produce thousands of antihydrogen atoms more efficiently because, at this scale, thousands of atoms genuinely matter.
That gives the most expensive material on Earth a strange status.
It is real but almost impossible to possess.
Potentially extraordinarily powerful but completely impractical as fuel.
Produced deliberately but only in microscopic quantities.
Scientifically valuable even though it has almost no ordinary commercial use.
Californium and other rare radioisotopes provide a useful comparison because they are genuinely manufactured, processed and distributed in measurable laboratory quantities. Some specialized isotopes can cost billions of dollars per gram equivalent.
Yet even those extraordinary materials belong to a different economic world from antimatter.
A laboratory can request micrograms of californium.
A laboratory cannot order a gram of antihydrogen.
And perhaps that is the best way to understand the price.
Antimatter is not expensive because billionaires are competing to own it.
It is expensive because modern civilization, with all of its particle accelerators, nuclear laboratories, supercomputers and engineering expertise, still struggles to make more than an almost unimaginably tiny amount.
The most expensive material on Earth is therefore valuable for an unusual reason.
Not because we have too little of something we found.
But because creating almost any of it at all is one of the hardest manufacturing challenges humanity has ever attempted.
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