In 2022, a crypto enthusiast bought the NFT of the first tweet for $2.9 million. By 2023, the NFT bubble busted and someone offered $3.77 for the tweet.
Once upon a time, in the faraway land of 2021, a brave entrepreneur named Sina Estavi saw something that would change his life forever. It was a tweet. Not just any tweet, mind you, but the tweet. Jack Dorsey’s very first utterance on Twitter: “just setting up my twttr.” And like any rational person encountering a five-word message from 2006 that anyone with an internet connection could read for free, Estavi did what made perfect sense: he spent $2.9 million on it.
Well, not on the tweet itself, exactly. On an NFT of the tweet. A digital certificate proving he owned… something. The concept of the tweet? The vibes? The blockchain receipt itself? Even now, scholars debate what precisely he purchased, though they agree on one thing: it cost $2.9 million.
The Mona Lisa of Our Time
Estavi, displaying the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who’ve never been wrong about anything, compared his purchase to the Mona Lisa. He was convinced that future generations would look back and understand the profound cultural significance of owning a tokenized link to a publicly visible tweet about setting up a social media account.
History, as it turns out, had other plans.
The Great Flip
Fast forward one year to April 2022. Estavi, perhaps sensing that he’d captured lightning in a bottle (or a JPEG in a blockchain), decided to share his good fortune with the world. He listed his precious first tweet NFT for the modest sum of $48 million.
This is where the story gets really heartwarming. The market, in its infinite wisdom, responded with seven bids. Seven whole bids! The highest? A cool $280.
Let me spell that out: two hundred and eighty dollars. Not $280,000. Not even $2,800. Just $280. That’s roughly the price of a nice dinner for two, or about 0.00096% of what he’d paid.
Estavi, demonstrating the kind of diamond hands that crypto enthusiasts celebrate in their fever dreams, declined to sell. He would hold. The market simply didn’t understand yet.
The Reckoning
By 2023, the best offer hovering around his digital Mona Lisa was approximately $3.77. To be fair, that’s still enough to buy a decent coffee. Just not at Starbucks.
The math here is beautiful in its brutality: a 99.9% loss. It’s the kind of investment return that makes putting your life savings into Beanie Babies look prescient.
The Bigger Picture
But here’s the thing: Estavi’s first tweet NFT wasn’t an outlier. It was the poster child for an entire movement. During the NFT mania of 2021-2022, digital images of bored apes sold for hundreds of thousands. Pixelated punks went for millions. Everyone was getting rich, or so the Discord servers promised. It was the future of art, of ownership, of everything.
The technology, they said, would revolutionize the world. And in a way, it did—just not in the direction anyone expected. It revolutionized our understanding of how quickly speculative bubbles can inflate, pop, and leave everyone standing around wondering what just happened.
What Did We Learn?
Perhaps the real NFT was the friends we made along the way. Or the lesson about greater fool theory. Or the reminder that just because something is new and involves blockchain doesn’t mean it’s valuable.
Or maybe, just maybe, the lesson is simpler: if you’re about to spend $2.9 million on a tweet, take a deep breath, close your laptop, and go outside for a walk.
That tweet will still be there when you get back. And it’ll still be free.
Epilogue: Jack Dorsey, who sold the original NFT, donated the money to charity. So at least someone’s $2.9 million did some good in the world. As for the NFT itself, it remains unsold, a digital monument to the time when we all collectively lost our minds about monkey JPEGs and tokenized tweets.
The tweet, meanwhile, continues to exist on Twitter/X, completely oblivious to its brief, expensive moment in the sun. You can still read it right now. For free. Imagine that.
jonelblog 