SpaceX Founder and Chief Engineer Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, on Tuesday withdrew the offer to sell one of his tweets as a non-fungible token (NFT) despite a bidder offering more than $ 1 million for the digital asset.
Musk said in a tweet on Monday, “I’m selling this song through NFTs as an NFT.” The social media post he put up for sale contained a song that read, “NFT for your vanity. Computers never sleep. It’s verified. It’s guaranteed.”
The tweet up for sale also included a short loop of video that featured a trophy called “Vanity Trophy” with the phrase “NFT” at the top and “HODL” at the bottom. HODL is a cheer used by cryptocurrency fans and retail investors to encourage coworkers to hold onto a coin or stock in a company rather than sell it.
On Tuesday, Musk changed his tune and said in a tweet, “Actually, it doesn’t feel quite right to sell this. It will go away.”
NFTs are unique crypto tokens used to represent digital assets, including images and video clips. They can be bought and sold like physical collectibles. NFTs are executed in a decentralized digital ledger or a blockchain. This means that transactions, ownership, and validity of all assets that an NFT represents can be tracked.
Musk’s tweet, including his caption, video and song, went up for sale as an NFT on Valuables, a platform published by Cent, the blockchain-based social media network. According to Valuables, the highest final bid on the Musk tweet was $ 1,121,000 from a Twitter user with the handle @SinaEstavi.
The experimental CEO is known for lately supporting digital assets like Bitcoin, Dogecoin and now NFTs. In February, Tesla announced that it had purchased $ 1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and that cryptocurrency acquisitions may continue to be made.
Musk’s romantic partner, a musician named Grimes, also sold around $ 6 million of her digital works of art after being auctioned off in recent weeks.
His exciting NFT offer on Monday helped Musk distract his tens of millions of followers on Twitter from news of Tesla top staff changes and a federal investigation into a Tesla crash that occurred late last week in Detroit.
On Monday, financial reports revealed that former Tesla Automotive President Jerome Guillen would be giving up that role to become Tesla’s President of Heavy Trucking instead. Tesla has yet to announce a successor to Guillen for the role of president of the automotive industry.
On the same day, the federal vehicle safety agency announced that it would send a team to Detroit to investigate the underlying causes of a “violent” accident that occurred there on March 11th involving a Tesla sedan and a tractor-trailer. The investigation is now ongoing.
For the past few months, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has warned investors not to buy or sell stocks and other assets based on information shared on social media. The financial regulator has also warned investors not to buy shares in SPACs or other assets simply because celebrities are involved in the deal.
– CNBC Make It reporter Taylor Locke contributed to this story.
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