Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Sells First-Ever Tweet as NFT for $2.9 Million

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has successfully sold the world’s first-ever tweet for the equivalent of just over $2.9 million as a non-fungible token (NFT).

Interesting Engineering reports that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has successfully sold the world’s first-ever tweet for over $2.9 million as a non-fungible token (NFT). The tweet which reads “just setting up my twitter,” was written by Dorsey in March 2006 and was bought by Malaysia-based businessman Sina Estavi.

Estavi told the BBC that his purchase was the equivalent of “buying the Mona Lisa painting.” Estavi is the chief executive of the technology firm Bridge Oracle and bought the tweet via an auction on the platform Valuables using Ethereum, a cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin.

Valuables is a platform created by startup Cent where people can buy and sell tweets that are autographed by their sellers. The tweet was sold as an NFT which links the tweet with a unique digital certificate, each NFT is autographed by the creator of a photo, video, or other form of digital art which allows anyone to verify the authenticity and ownership of the piece.

Breitbart News recently reported that NFT craze has grown in recent months to the surprise of many. Now even some celebrities are joining in on the craze, some looking to profit from the trend and others simply to ridicule what they believe to be the ridiculous concept of NFTs.

One such celebrity is British actor and comedian John Cleese, famous for his work in Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and A Fish Called Wanda amongst many others. Cleese is now selling a drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge he did on an iPad as an NFT. The “buy it now” price for the digital piece is being set at $69,346,250.50.

Breitbart News also recently reported that a Brooklyn-based film director named Alex Ramírez-Mallis is both mocking and attempting to profit from the recent cryptocurrency craze for NFTs by selling a year’s worth of fart audio clips recorded in quarantine.

Ramírez-Mallis told the New York Post: “If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?” His NFT, titled “One Calendar Year of Recorded Farts,” began development in March 2020 when he and his four friends began sharing recordings of their farts to a group chat on WhatsApp.

Ramírez-Mallis discussed the concept of NFTs referencing screenshots of screenshots and the concept of colors which are currently being sold, stating: “The NFT craze is absurd — this idea of putting a value on something inherently intangible. These NFTs aren’t even farts, they’re just digital alphanumeric strings that represent ownership.”

“I’m hoping these NFT farts can at once critique [the absurdity], make people laugh and make me rich,” he said. He did note that there is a historical precedent for the concept of NFTs, stating: “In many ways, this is a bubble, but it’s also been around forever. Buying and selling art purely as a commodity to store value in has been around for centuries, and NFTs are just a digital way of representing that transactional nature of art.”