A non-fungible token (NFT) of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever, which once sold for millions, may now sell for just a few thousand. The tweet, posted in 2006, read: “just setting up my twttr.”
Headlines about the manic craze for everyday-digital-artifacts-turned-NFTs in 2021 left a vast segment of non-Ethereum-owning ordinary citizens bewildered: Pixelated CryptoPunk icons auctioning off for over ten million dollars? A Kevin Roose New York Times column going for $560,000 (Kevin who)? Nyan Cat, an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart body, selling for $580,000 … in 2021? Among the eclectic e-tchotchkes that somebody paid certainly too much money for — 1,630.58 ETH or $2.9 million, to be precise — was Dorsey’s first tweet.
The winning bidder was Sina Estavi, the CEO of Bridge Oracle, a cryptocurrency company based in Malaysia which has seen the value of its currency drop precipitously since March 2021, when Estavi bought the Dorsey NFT. The tweet had been listed by Dorsey himself on the platform Valuables, and the proceeds from the bidding war went to the GiveDirectly Africa fund.
Estavi listed the NFT for sale on OpenSea last Thursday, pledging 50 percent of the cut to charity and estimating that he would be the benefactor behind a fat altruistic donation approaching $25 million. Not one to be outshone, Dorsey replied, “why not 99% of it?”
Not to fear: Estavi’s beneficence will in all probability be quite a trifling one, regardless of what percentage he opts to keep for himself. As of this writing, the highest bid on the token is 3.4 ETH, or $10,180, and Estavi said he would not sell it unless it reached an unspecified “high bid.”
“It’s important to me who wants to buy it, I will not sell this NFT to anyone because I do not think everyone deserves this NFT,” Estavi told the Guardian. (Surely that’s why it still hasn’t been sold yet.) “This NFT is not just a tweet, this is the Mona Lisa of the digital world,” he continued.
Estavi also seems to have had run-ins with the law based on his dubious misadventures into the crypto world: He claims he was apprehended last May during a trip to Iran for “disrupting the country’s economic system.”
