DId you know that tellurium is rarer than platinum? It is, but why is it so cheap then?

Tellurium’s annual commercial supply is largely soaked up in various applications in the semiconductor industry but still accounts for several orders of magnitude less demand than precious metals. Fewer buyers means fewer dollars vying for the tellurium pie. The price tag for 99.9% tellurium (towards the low end of the purity scale) may cost less than $100 a kilogram. With an estimated annual production of fewer than 500 tons this means that a hedge fund could, with just a few million dollars, completely screw up the supply chain and corner the market on this rare commodity. If you ever wanted to be a supervillain….

Tellurium’s crystal growth is scaly and curvy looking a bit like a metal pineapple (and quite similar to manganese which is otherwise completely dissimilar in properties).