If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what is a picture of a tweet worth? Just over $48 million, according to one CEO.
Sina Estavi, the chief of Malaysian blockchain service Bridge Oracle, said in a tweet yesterday that he wants to sell Jack Dorsey’s first tweet as an NFT for 14,969 Ether, or about $48.3 million, 16 times what Estavi paid for it a year ago. It is now listed for that price on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
The massive price tag for what is essentially an image of a tweet with a verified owner, would put the NFT in a similar price range as works of art by famous artists like Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, according to CoinMarketCap.
Picasso’s Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée sold for $68.7 million at the auction house Sotheby’s in 2018, and van Gogh’s L’Allée des Alyscamps sold for $72.4 million in 2015.
Even in terms of the outrageous prices of the NFT market, the asking price is steep. The first notable piece of NFT art to sell was Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, which fetched an eye-popping $69 million at auction last year. After Beeple’s landmark sale, the market for profile picture NFTs exploded, with two popular collections, Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks selling for the highest prices. Still, the most expensive Bored Ape ever sold cost just over $2 million and no CryptoPunk except for one has sold for more than $23 million, according to DappRadar, which tracks NFT sales.
The 2006 tweet from @jack says: “just setting up my twttr,” and was purchased as an NFT by Estavi in March of 2021 for about $2.9 million. Estavi considers it a work of art.
“I think years later people will realize the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting,” he tweeted around the time he bought it.
Estavi has promised to donate 50% of the sale proceeds to the charity GiveDirectly, which gives money directly to families living in poverty in East Africa.
Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO of Twitter last November, quickly responded to Estavi in a tweet on Thursday, asking why Estavi wouldn’t donate 99% of the proceeds to charity. Estavi followed up saying he’d consider Dorsey’s request.
“I don’t want the rest for myself; I’d prefer to use the rest to support blockchain projects (@bridge_oracle) and help my people, but your suggestion is valuable to me. If you like, I would donate 100% of it to charity if you let me know,” he tweeted on Thursday.
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