Sure, things like precious metals and fine spices are expensive. However, no substance on Earth can hold a torch to the elusive antimatter. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, is happy to point out that the fact that there’s way more antimatter than matter is one of the profound mysteries of the universe, but that’s just part of its estimated value. Its true cost comes from the fact that it’s extremely difficult to get a hold of the stuff.   

According to Steven Farmer’s book Strange Chemistry: The Stories Your Chemistry Teacher Wouldn’t Tell You (via Science To Go), antimatter costs no less than $62.5 trillion (as in, $62.5 million millions) per gram. This is because scientists have tried to obtain and contain the substance for years, and as a result, the collective scientific community has spent a ridiculous amount of time and money on the technology and know-how required for the project. CERN’s famous Large Hadron Collider alone cost roughly $4.75 billion, and has annual operationg costs of $1 billion. There’s also the fact that it takes about 100 billion years to produce a gram of the only antimatter we’ve managed to get a hold on, antihydrogen. 

Of course, some of that may be nitpicking a bit. In fact the Telegraph has noted that some scientists have given antimatter a significantly smaller monetary value. Still, even that massively deflated value would be a whopping $25 billion per gram.