SortStack #1893 — 2031-08-15

By price · Order from cheapest to most expensive.

1. An average US movie theater ticket $11

   Theaters keep little of this — studios take most of the box office, which is why a bucket of popcorn can cost nearly as much as the seat.

2. A new big-budget video game at launch $70

   Adjusted for inflation, games are cheaper than ever: a Nintendo cartridge in the early Nineties often cost the equivalent of well over a hundred of today's dollars.

3. A pair of white Nike Air Force 1 sneakers $110

   Released in 1982 as a basketball shoe, the Air Force 1 still sells millions of pairs a year — virtually unchanged in design for four decades.

4. The Mercedes 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe, the most expensive car ever sold $142M

   Mercedes had kept both existing cars for nearly 70 years before secretly auctioning one in 2022 — the buyer's identity and the car's location remain closely guarded.

5. Building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN $4.8B

   The LHC's 27 km ring is colder than outer space — its magnets sit at 1.9 kelvin — and it briefly held a section of the emptiest vacuum in the solar system.

6. WhatsApp, when Facebook bought it $19B

   At the 2014 acquisition, WhatsApp had about 55 employees serving 450 million users — a price of roughly $350 million per employee.

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