I work at a glorified refinery that basically makes high purity metals that go into computer processors and stuff. I do analytical chemistry for quality control, basically we get small chunks of the various metals and chop them up and test them to make sure they’re as pure as they need to be. Well about a year ago while I was working here as a temp, the guy I ended up replacing full time was caught stealing various metals during the very early hours of the morning (he arrived earlier than most everyone else). Turns out he had been doing this for at least a few years and selling the metals to an out of state, no-questions-asked scrap yard. He’d even gone as far as claiming he had won a few hundred thousand dollars in the lottery a couple years back to account for his sudden nice car.

Most of what he got was a metal called Tantalum. He had hundreds of pounds of tantalum (runs about ~$80 per pound) in his car alone. Its not technically a precious metal, but its worth more than copper and is very rare (the only known mines are in Asia). He also got paladium, gold, silver, indium, titanium, chromium, manganese, and a bunch of others, including as per the question, platinum.

Today they finally brought back a huge box full of metal he took for us to sort out (no longer need it as evidence I guess). In this box there were several hundred “sample bags” that we use. They’re about 2 inches wide and maybe 6 inches high, and each contain a metal, with a label on the outside of the bag. I pulled one out at random, and it was a bag of platinum. I weighed it and took out the bag weight…. ~21 grams of platinum… Less than the amount of sugar in most cans of pop…. if you took a pencil, shaved off an inch or two, removed the graphite and broke it into little pieces in the palm of your hand, thats about the amount of platinum.

Without cheating, just guess how much that tiny amount of pure platinum is worth right now.