It doesn't cost that. Probably been approached multiple times and got tired of replying, so they've set a prohibitive price.

Speaking of buying and selling domain names I heard something interesting on a podcast a few days ago about buying a parked domain from someone else.

What they said was, if you are starting a business and the domain name that you want is already taken, you could approach the domain owner with the following suggestion:

You will rent the domain from them for a period of time, say two years, with a contract that gives you the option to buy the domain from them after that time has passed, at some price you both agree upon now.

This agreement could be beneficial to both parties.

- You avoid shelling out a lot of money for a domain name now for a business you don’t know whether will work out or not. The money you don’t spend on that domain name now you can use on engineering, marketing etc.

- They get money from renting the domain name to you, instead of just having it parked and earning them some meager amount of money from the ads they might have on the parked domain. On top of that, if your business works out then they get a good deal of money selling the domain to you in the future.

Of course you will have to be certain that the people you make this agreement with are trustworthy and that they will uphold their end of the contract.

Off topic here, but on a different comment there was a discussion about smart contracts. While they are often over hyped this would be a practical example where they would make sense.

I suspect Mark found it to be an interesting thought experiment to decide at what price he'd actually be willing to sell the domain (that hosts much of his life work!), and then he listed it just in case someone would actually pay that.

I don't suspect anyone has ever actually been interested in buying the domain, to be perfectly honest.