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A white elephant is a supposedly valuable possession whose upkeep costs exceed its usefulness, and it is therefore a liability. The term derives from the white elephant of East Asia, which is high-maintenance and has no practical use, but is considered sacred in Burmese culture (and therefore cannot be neglected or abandoned).
A white elephant would be gifted to an enemy in the hope of bringing them to financial ruin.

P.T. Barnum once sent an agent to buy a white elephant, sight unseen, hoping to use it as a circus attraction. When it arrived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, it was covered with large pinkish splotches and was not white at all. The public was not impressed and Barnum had to keep his "white elephant" hidden from public view in a stable while he tried to decide how to recover some of the high cost. The elephant later died when this stable burned down.

The metaphor was popularized in the United States after New York Giants manager John McGraw told the press that Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Shibe had "bought himself a white elephant" by acquiring the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team in 1901. The Athletics manager Connie Mack subsequently selected the elephant as the team symbol and mascot. The team is occasionally referred to as the White Elephants.

Examples

Aircraft

* Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company (BAC) in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from England to the United States.
* Concorde, a supersonic transport built by Aérospatiale and BAC, intended to allow high-speed intercontinental travel. Only fourteen examples saw service, though development costs were to be amortized over hundreds of units.
* Hughes H-4 Hercules, or "Spruce Goose," often called Howard Hughes' white elephant before and during Senate War Investigating Committee
* The U.S. Space Shuttle, whose continued funding is debated versus other forms of space transportation, which are thought by some to be more reliable and affordable.
* The BAC TSR-2 which was to have been the UK's replacement bomber during the cold-war but never went into service.

Railway

* The fully automated North East Line and Bukit Panjang Light Rail Transport (LRT) Line of the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit. (Debated: These lines are yet to be profitable like the other rail lines in Singapore, but proponents argue that these reduce congestion)

Highway

*Interstate 180 (Illinois) is a 13-mile freeway intended largely to serve a steel mill that closed soon after the freeway was completed. It has very light traffic for a freeway, roughly 2000 to 2500 vehicles per day even after the steel mill was re-opened almost thirty years after the highway was built. It has about one tenth the traffic of the highway to which it connects and has one of the lowest traffic loads of any Interstate highway in the United States.

Structures and engineering projects

* Kansai International Airport. Located on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, south of Osaka, Japan and constructed largely as a matter of pride, this airport, though operating at a fraction of nominal capacity, is being doubled in size. Compounding matters are intense competition from Kobe Airport (14 mi / 23 km away) and Osaka International Airport (27 mi / 43 km away.) Furthermore, the airport is slowly (about 15-20 cm per annum) sinking into the ocean.
* Millennium Dome. Built in London by the Government for the Millennium celebrations. It is the largest single roofed structure in the world.
* Montréal-Mirabel International Airport. Opened in 1975, it was at the time the largest airport (in terms of land use) ever opened, with 88,000 acres (356 km²) reserved. Less than 19% of the reserved land was ever used for airport development. The airport never lived up to expectations due to poor location, lack of transportation links, and economic decline. It is now relegated to use by cargo airlines, with cessation of passenger traffic occurring in 2004.
* Montreal Olympic Stadium. Built for the 1976 Summer Olympics, then used primarily as the home baseball ballpark for the Montreal Expos until the team permanently left the city in 2004. The stadium sits primarily vacant most of the year due to structual instabilities, its poor interior design, and inconvient location. The construction cost was over $2.3 billion dollars.
* Ryugyong Hotel. Construction of this hotel in Pyongyang consumed 2% of the Gross Domestic Product of North Korea. Originally intended to rival Western bloc greats such as the Sears Tower, the building now sits as an unfinished, windowless concrete shell. As the building is seen as being structurally unsound, it will likely never be completed.
* Superconducting Super Collider (or SSC), a large particle accelerator which was being constructed in Texas. Billions of dollars had been spent on the project by the time of cancellation, and the project termination itself cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
* Three Gorges Dam, a monumental project to bring hydroelectric power to the Yangtze River basin in China, beset with construction, environmental, and societal issues.
* World Trade Center México, a building complex located in Mexico City, which bankrupted its owners without ever being finished or performing its intended functions.
*World Trade Center, New York. Built amidst controversy, including protest by the 1,600 small businesses evicted from their locations to make way for the complex, and the objections of the New York City government to the undervalued payments in lieu of taxes the state governments of New York and New Jersey were forcing it to accept from the Port Authority of New York, builder and owner of the Trade Center. By 1975 it lay half-empty in spite of the 25,000 New York State employees relocated to the complex by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who had championed the project all along. The buildings' fortune improved gradually throughout their lifespan, which was cut short when terrorists destroyed them on September 11, 2001. However, the complex was initially viewed as a monument to the stubbornness of Gov. Rockefeller, his brother David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Port Authority Executive Director Austin J. Tobin, for their insistence upon building it in spite of the declining value of Lower Manhattan commercial real estate at the time. This perception lent the World Trade Center's twin 110-story towers the early nickname Nelson and David.

Technology

* The Department of Defense-commissioned Ada programming language came to be known as the "Green Elephant", a play on the phrase White Elephant combined with color code used keep contract selection unbiased. Ada was designed to be a silver bullet by a DoD assembled committee. However due to the fact that most programmers do not write embedded programs, many find Ada too unwieldy to use and of little benefit.
* Intel's IA-64 (better known as Itanium) semiconductor architecture, which cost billions of dollars to develop, but is now relegated to a niche role in the computer industry. The public didn't take long to rename it as "Itanic".

Nautical

* The Thai aircraft carrier HTMS Chakri Nareubet which has spent little time at sea since being commissioned in 1997 (the year of the Asian Economic Crisis) due to her high operating costs. Somewhat fittingly, the Royal Thai Navy ensign actually features a white elephant.
* SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch in 1858, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling. However, her hold was later gutted and converted to lay the successful 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable, an impossible task for a smaller vessel.

Other examples

* The Waterloo Vase, a great urn, 15 ft (5 m) high and weighing 20 tons, fashioned from a single piece of Carrara marble.