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The first-ever tweet, now 15 years old, gets sold for over $2.9 million

Always keep your first-ever works no matter how dull; you never know when they might turn to gold, or in this case, turn to $2.9 million.

The first-ever tweet, now 15 years old, gets sold for over $2.9 million
(Image: Getty Images/Prakash Singh)

That’s how much Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey made this week after his first-ever tweet sold at over $2.9 million when bidding closed on the Valuables platform on Monday. 

Dorsey first sent the short tweet — “just setting up my twttr” — on March 21, 2006, a mere day after Twitter was founded. Since its publication, the tweet has been liked more than 162,000 times and has been shared more than 135,000 times.

The winning bid for the historic tweet came from Sina Estavi, the CEO of the Malaysian blockchain service Bridge Oracle. After waging a bidding war with tech entrepreneur Justin Sun, Estavi’s bid of over $2.9 million won, and she got to take home the NFT in the form of a digitally autographed version of the tweet.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets, such as images and video clips, that can be bought and sold with cryptocurrency. Think of these as super rare collector items in virtual form. They are sold on digital platforms like Valuables, a blockchain-powered social media network, which tracks and verifies the ownership of each asset through encryption.

After securing the NFT, Estavi took to Twitter to celebrate, saying that Dorsey’s tweet is “not just a tweet,” and likens it to the Mona Lisa painting whose true value is realized years after its creation.

Dorsey, on the other hand, explained that he would donate the proceeds to GiveDirectly, a non-profit organization that assists those living in extreme poverty in Africa. Immediately after his NFT sale, Dorsey converted the massive amount to bitcoin and forwarded it to the organization.

According to the latest reports, Dorsey, who is an ardent supporter of cryptocurrency and its ecosystem, is now worth $13 billion. He started Twitter in 2006, which back then functioned as an SMS-based communication platform where people could “follow” what their friends were doing based on status messages.

(Banner image from Variety)

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