I was joking around in discord the other day and wanted to post a funny picture of a gold Twinkie so I did a quick search for a picture. Well, what I found was funny and interesting and produced more questions then answers, of course.
Questions like; Is this for real? Is it pure (.999) gold? Who won this bar? Does the winner still have it? And the biggest question in my mind, WHY!? Why would someone make a gold bar that looks like a turd? I mean that is the most unappealing shape for gold I can think of, but that's just me so let's dive in and see if we can solve this mystery.
Back in 1981 Hostess Twinkies held a contest with the grand prize being a solid gold Twinkie cake :D
After digging up that gem I then found this scan of an game card with the official rules on the back.
AMAZING!! Now we are getting somewhere!
Let's take a look at the price of gold in 1981 for some context.
It looks like we opened the year with gold at around $630/oz and closed 1981 at about $410/oz (oof).
So how much would a "$50,000 solid gold Twinkie cake" have to weigh to be worth that $50k, 40 years ago? Well, let's make the math easy and say $500/oz is the average for the year. That would make this solid gold cake about 100 ounces!
Searching online for a 100 ounce gold bar for sale I could only find one available on a Canadian website selling for CA$223,606, which adjusts to just over $180,000 US dollars!
Now this brings up the question of the purity of the gold. Was it .999 fine gold? We don't know but I would have to assume so just by looking at the value of the cake. If it was a mix of gold and other metals it would have to be huge to be worth $50,000 in 1981.
Now, let's look closer at the rules from the back of the game card. Here is a look at a breakdown of the prizes.
There are a couple things of note here, first it seems there were 24 million tickets printed as the top prize has odds of 24 million to 1 :)
Next, there were 50, 1 oz gold Twinkie cake ingots available as prizes as well. Again we don't know the purity but if they were .999 then they were worth about $500 each at the time.
Lastly, they gave away 5 GOLD (color) CADILLACS!!!
I've searched as many different keywords and phrases I could think of to find more info on the winner of this unreal prize (or any winners from this contest) but have found nothing more than this post on hostessrecipes.com.
#nothelpful
Then I looked closer at the rules and noticed this little line of text...
...which makes me feel the winner of this prize probably opted for the $50,000 in cash, in which case the ingot would not have even been produced. I am holding out hope that there is an actual 1981 vintage, 100 ounce .999 fine gold Twinkie cake out there somewhere.
But until that can be proven I guess I'll just watch thousands of real Twinkies roll by on a conveyor belt.
