Jack Dorsey, the CEO and co-founder of the social media platform Twitter, has sold his first ever tweet for over $2.9 million.
The tweet, which was posted at 08:50PM on March 21, 2006, simply reads: "just setting up my twttr".
As reported by BBC News, the tweet was purchased by Malaysia-based businessman Sina Estavi, who purchased the post using the ether cryptocurrency, a rival to bitcoin.
The price of the tweet reportedly surged following a bidding war between Estavi, who is the CEO of cryptocurrency company Bridge Oracle, and tech entrepreneur Justin Sun.
The tweet was sold as a unique digital token called an NFT - or a non-fungible token. NFTs - such as video clips or jpegs - can be purchased just like any other items, but they have no physical form and exist only in the digital world.
Following his purchase, Estavi compared the historic tweet to Leonardo Di Vinci's Mona Lisa painting.
"This is not just a tweet! I think years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting," he wrote on his own Twitter account.
And for those of you shaking your head at just how ridiculous the world has become, the good news is that the tweet was auctioned off for charity.
Dorsey will be donating the $2.9 million raised to GiveDirectly’s Africa Response, which provides Covid relief throughout the continent.
Per The Independent, the tweet will continue to remain publicly available, and could even still be deleted by Dorsey if he so wished.
Estavi will, however, receive a digitally signed certificate that has been verified by Dorsey, as well as the metadata of the original tweet (and now this is all starting to go over my head).
And you could call Estavi somewhat of a tweet aficionado, as he has also bid $1.1 million to purchase an NFT of one of Elon Musk's tweets, in which the Tesla CEO wrote: "I’m selling this song about NFTs as an NFT."
Estavi also reportedly owns three other NFTs - but the value of those is significantly lower, at just $130.
Think all this is crazy? Well how would you feel if you found out that following the recent surge in popularity of NFTs, an artist by the name of Krista Kim recently sold a digital house for roughly $500,000.
Stop the planet, I'd like to get off.
