Apologies in advance for the percussive alliteration, but two tech titans tied to opposite ends of the same Twitter timeline have made the news this week.
The digital colossuses (colossi? C’mon readers, help me out) are Jack Dorsey, who built the all-conquering social media platform in his shed in 2006, and Elon Musk, who owns pretty much everything not already spoken for by Dorsey, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, that chap who owns Manchester City, and Rishi Sunak’s wife. It’s not a bad haul for two guys who look like, respectively, Scott Ian of US thrash metal band Anthrax and Val Kilmer fronting a ZZ Top tribute act. At least if you squint.
Dorsey was in the news because his first ever tweet, which is also Twitter’s first ever tweet, has been put up for sale by its ‘owner’, one Sina Estavi. Mr Estavi ‘bought’ the tweet as a non-fungible token (NFT) when it was ‘sold’ at auction in March 2021. (The inverted commas are for those still struggling to wrap their noodles round the idea of NFTs. If that’s you, try this: an NFT is a way of conferring ownership on something which only exists in the digital realm and can therefore be reproduced, or ‘right-clicking’ in the parlance).
Mr Estavi paid just shy of $2.9 million (£2.2 million) for the tweet and has now put it up for sale on NFT trading website Open Sea. It reads “just setting up my twttr” and being a historic artifact to rank alongside such items as Alexander Graham Bell’s first…
