Posted by c249709 7/1/2025
4o: that's $25.7 million
Is the idea of the exhibit that the cube is empty other than the outside edges?
Mr beast routinely has a million dollars as a prop and it's significantly smaller than this, and cubed values go up FAST
I bring this up because the article and many of the comments here act like this "cost" the Fed $1.5 million to make the cube.
Who gets anything out of giving people the wrong idea about what $1m would look like?
If you are commissioning the thing to be built, why might you want it to either contain more than $1m, or be hollow and larger than what $1m really is? What purpose does an incorrect display serve? A correct display already serves almost no purpose in the first place, now make it incorrect.
None of the reasons I can think of would seem to apply here:
Disinformation.
Advertizement.
Art, where the artists point was to make it wrong and never tell anyone.
Simple goof up? This one is at least plausible. Someone estimated wrong, got a local shop to build an expensive cube(1), well we got the cube we got, fill it and get the display up.
(1) That will have to be quite thick polycarbonate or glass, not cheap. In fact, that right there might expose that there is at least some kind of fakery inside, if the glass is not at least as thick as the aluminum frame, then it's not strong enough, neither is the frame for that matter if it's what it looks like. So if the glass and frame are as thin as they look, then there is some kind of internal skeleton.)
Maybe there is some other significance we've lost since it was built. Maybe the $1m was never the interesting point originally. Maybe instead the dimensions or maybe weight of the cube were the interrsting thing, and this is really something like "1000 gallons of $1 bills" and that just hsppens to come out to 1.55m.