Despite receiving a $1.12 million bid, Elon Musk said: 'Actually, doesn’t feel quite right selling this. Will pass.'
Elon Musk was determined to make a splash when he announced that he was selling a non-fungible token devoted to NFTs — complete with a song and a whizzy music video.
But despite receiving a bid of over $1.12 million for his tokenized tweet — with the renowned crypto artist Beeple jokingly offering to pay the $69.3 million he received after a record-breaking auction of his artwork at Christie’s — it looks like the self-proclaimed “technoking” of Tesla has changed his mind.
On Twitter, he wrote: “Actually, doesn’t feel quite right selling this. Will pass.”
Tweets as NFTs: A Good Idea?
We wanted to know what would happen if Elon Musk created a new tweet with identical content and decided to mint that — and what would happen if a tweet that had been sold as an NFT was deleted. Also, we wanted to ask whether there was anything stopping Musk from creating an identical NFT on a rival platform. Unfortunately, we didn’t receive a reply from Valuables.*
Several of Musk’s followers contributed their own tongue-in-cheek tweets, with one writing: “I’m selling this screenshot of Elon’s song he’s selling about NFTs as an NFT as an NFT.”
On the issue of whether identical tweets could be minted, he said:
"The text of the tweet isn't the only aspect embedded in the NFT. The creator also embeds the timestamp of the tweet as well as other metadata, so no two NFT tweets are the same. For Elon to sell multiple tweets with the same text is entirely up to him."
When asked what happened if a tweet gets deleted, he explained:
"The NFT that a creator makes using their tweet continues to live on, embedded in the Matic blockchain."
And on the issue of whether Musk could launch an identical NFT on a rival platform, he added:
"No. However, selling the same thing on multiple platforms may hurt the credibility of the creator as it relates to future sales."