- The Lego piece sold for a lot of money, but it’s also genuinely worth quite a bit.
A lot of people dream of making that special find at Goodwill (or another thrift store) that is secretly worth a whole bunch of money. It can be tough, though, since you have a lot of competition.
Not least from Goodwill itself. Take, for example, this recent jackpot.
Earlier this year, staff at a Pennsylvania Goodwill store discovered an unusual object in a bag of jewelry they’d received. It was a small, gold-colored Lego piece — more specifically, a mask from the 2000s Bionicle line.
Initially, the store didn’t think much of it, figuring out it was a misplaced Lego piece. So, they put it up for sale online for a dozen or so bucks.
It soon became clear this wasn’t just any Lego block made of golden plastic. First of all, the thing is actual gold, and it’s also exceedingly rare, with only a couple of dozen copies ever made.
Realizing they were sitting on, well, gold, Goodwill pulled the Bionicle piece off their web store and put it up for auction. That was a good move on their part as the thing ended up selling for more than $18,000.
Yet, it could’ve sold for more. In an initial auction, Goodwill agreed to sell the piece for $33,000 — but the buyer couldn’t gather the funds in time.
‘You Wouldn’t Think Anything of It’
The saga of the golden Lego mask begins at a local Goodwill store in Du Bois, Pennsylvania. As is routine, the store received a bag of old jewelry, donated by people who no longer needed or wanted them.
In that bag, however, was more than just jewelry — or so it would seem. Among the rest of the bag’s contents was a small Lego piece.
Oh well, it must’ve gotten mixed in with the rest of the stuff by accident, everyone thought.
“You wouldn’t think anything of it. It came in a little old-looking Lego box,” Chad Smith, the vice president of e-commerce and technology for Goodwill in North-Central Pennsylvania, told People.
Still, it wasn’t your ordinary Lego block. The piece’s unusual shape clearly identified it as being from the Bionicle series, produced between 2000 and 2010.
The series, accompanied by a surprisingly intricate fantasy story, featured robot-like characters that were more like action figures than your usual Lego models. These characters each wore a distinctive mask, just like the one Goodwill found.
Additionally, the piece was golden. Not just gold-colored, but actual 14-karat gold.
Still, though, Goodwill figured it was just an unusual Lego piece. So, they put it up for sale on their online store platform for $14.95 — which is a pretty hefty price for a Lego piece.
Supremely Rare
Almost immediately after the mask went up for sale, though, people began contacting Goodwill. The messages that poured in warned the company that they were making a huge mistake.
It turns out that the golden Lego mask is a ridiculously rare piece. Smith told CBS News that the piece originates from 2001 with the first wave of Bionicle models.
“It was a giveaway, and there were 25, I believe, that were given away and five remained for people who actually worked at Lego,” he detailed.
Simply put, there are so few of the gold Lego pieces in existence that it’s a small miracle one cropped up at Goodwill. Yet, it did, and now the company was left to decide what to do with it.
Sold and Sold Again
Well, Goodwill still decided to sell it. The piece went up for auction and bids began pouring in, with the winning bid eventually reaching a whopping $33,000.
Unfortunately for the anonymous winner, they weren’t able to cough up the money by the deadline. So, the piece was put up for sale again — and this time, Smith stayed up all night vetting the bids to make sure they were legitimate.
By the time the auction closed, Goodwill had received 48 bids, with the highest reaching $18,101. Not quite as impressive as the previous sum, but this time the buyer actually paid for their purchase.
With that, the golden Bionicle mask became the most expensive Lego piece ever sold. The previous champion — a similarly 14-karat solid gold brick that was once handed out to people who had worked for 25 years at Lego — sold for merely $15,000 in 2020.
You might think the $18,101 price is outrageous — and it would be if this were a normal plastic piece. But let’s do a bit of math here.
At the time of writing, the price of gold stands at $2,181 per ounce. The Bionicle mask (according to photos on the auction site) weighs 26 grams, so about 9 ounces.
As 14-karat gold, the piece has a gold content of around 58.3% — so, a bit above 5 ounces. That means the gold in the mask is worth nearly $11,000.
So, the buyer really only paid about $7,000. And that’s much more reasonable, isn’t it?