Jack Dorsey's First Tweet Just Sold for $2.9 Million
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey auctioned his first-ever tweet as an NFT, closing at $2.9 million via the Valuables platform.
If you needed a sign that the NFT boom has fully broken containment, here it is: Jack Dorsey’s first tweet — the plain, slightly absurd “just setting up my twttr” from March 2006 — sold as a non-fungible token for $2.9 million. The sale closed around March 22 through Valuables, a platform built specifically for auctioning tweets as NFTs.
The buyer, Sina Estavi, says he plans to donate the proceeds to charity. Worth noting that Dorsey isn’t selling the tweet itself, or removing it from Twitter, or transferring any copyright. The tweet still lives at its original URL, visible to anyone, exactly as it always has. What Estavi bought is a cryptographically signed certificate — tied to the blockchain — asserting that he owns “the” NFT version of it, complete with Dorsey’s digital signature. It’s less like buying a house and more like buying a numbered print of a poster that’s also hanging free in every coffee shop in town.
That distinction is exactly why this story is so polarizing right now. Critics point out you’re paying millions for a receipt, not the underlying thing. Proponents argue that’s true of a lot of collectibles — a signed baseball card doesn’t stop other copies of that card from existing, but the signature and provenance are the value. Digital scarcity, manufactured through the blockchain, is the whole pitch of NFTs, and whether the market buys it long-term is still very much an open question.
Part of a bigger wave
This isn’t happening in isolation. March has been a wild month for NFTs generally — auction houses have been moving digital art for eye-watering sums, and money is clearly flowing into this space faster than most people expected even a few weeks ago. Dorsey’s tweet is a good encapsulation of the moment: it takes something totally mundane and free (a tweet anyone can screenshot) and finds a way to attach a seven-figure price tag to a version of it.
Twitter itself, notably, isn’t the seller here — this is Dorsey personally cashing in on his own historical footnote as the platform’s first post, using third-party infrastructure (Valuables, built on the Ethereum-adjacent tooling that’s become standard for this kind of thing).
A few things I’ll be watching. First, whether this kind of “own a famous digital moment” auction becomes a recurring pattern — plenty of other early tweets, memes, and viral posts could get the same treatment if there’s appetite for it. Second, whether the charity angle becomes a template; positioning these sales as fundraising rather than pure speculation might make them more palatable to a skeptical public. And third, and most interesting to me, whether the current frenzy is a genuine reordering of how we think about digital ownership, or a speculative bubble that cools off once the novelty wears thin. Right now it’s impossible to tell from the inside of it — but $2.9 million for a tweet is the kind of number that gets even non-crypto people paying attention.