Harambe-Shaped Cheeto Gets $100K eBay Bid: Know More About Jesus Toasts, Cheetos Art Museums And How Harambe Became More Popular Than Chester The Cheetah

A quick search on the internet with the words “What can you buy with $100k?” can yield a few interesting results. You could rent a private jet, hire the Roots to play at your private birthday or even buy Kobe Bryant’s championship ring.

The information revealed by the Google search is important to know in order to have an adequate reaction to the news of a man who bid $99,999.00 on eBay for a Cheeto that bears resemblance to Harambe, the deceased gorilla from the Cincinnati Zoo whose death inspired a million memes on the internet.

Harambe was shot dead when he grabbed and carried a 4-year-old boy who crawled through a barrier and fell inside the gorilla enclosure. His death invited public furor after #JusticeForHarambe began trending on Twitter and people began calling for the child’s parents to be punished on the internet through online petitions and through public forums such as Change.org. Since his death, Harambe has become an internet and pop culture icon and of course as people started taking notice, he also started being resurrected through merchandise.

In the event that there are no further bids and the current one is neither a hoax nor a prank, by the time auction ends Tuesday at 3:45 a.m. EST, an eBay user identified as valuestampsinc will earn at least $99,999 for the otherwise worthless item whose bid was started at $11.99.

If the absurdity of all this grabs you like a 400 lb gorilla grabs a four-year-old child, don’t be alarmed. The tradition of trying to sell a weird-looking snack item for exorbitant amounts of money is not new.

There are tons of these stories that have been doing the rounds for a while. Biblical figures such as Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary appearing on toast have not only fetched huge amounts of money for those who sell them, it has even inspired American ingenuity to develop toasters that cater to the niche market of people who would prefer to take a bite into their breakfast resembling their lord. But the Cheetos game is more versatile.

"Cheetos are like clouds — each has a unique shape that comes to life with your imagination. Since their inception, Cheetos snacks have captivated consumers with their whimsical shapes and uncanny resemblances to landmarks, animals, objects and even deities,” Jeannie Cho, vice president of marketing, Frito-Lay said last year while inaugurating a promotional contest with a grand prize of $60,000, and a collective prize money of $150,000 to curate the 10 most unique Cheetos to be featured in a Cheetos museum.

Yes, just like clouds, expensive clouds. If you try and look, you can see all sorts of strangely shaped Cheetos being sold ranging from superman, sea horses, and even Chuck Norris. There is even the story of a man trying to sell a bald eagle shaped Cheeto to fund his honeymoon and then there are the unique collectors, such as Jacob Stitzel, a Cheetos collector from Ohio who has been collecting them since he was a child.

Like Jacob, many of the contestants from the Cheetos Museum contest were profiled by the company for their findings. Andy Huot, a mechanical engineer who has been collecting and photographing rare Cheetos and his art to the world through an Instagram page called cheesecurlsofinstagram, for his love for his hobby that he describes as art.

Andy explained why he does what he does: “I think art is something that you don’t see every day. You look at it and it makes you feel something. It induces emotions. Sometimes, it also makes you wonder what the hell is going on… sometimes I think, you know, 'What am I doing? Why am I wasting my time with this?'... but when I read the comments, I realize it's all worth it… it’s easy to think of this as a big joke… but there’s something magical in bringing Cheetos to life.”