There are some people who a just so influential that anything they touch- or tweet- turns to gold. It is tough to think of anyone who better fits that bill than Elon Musk. He has his very rich fingers in a lot of very lucrative and expensive pies, including more than a few ultra-successful NFT ventures.
First things first, who is exactly is this person who has the power to make or break a cryptocurrency with a single post? Well, where to start.
- Elon Musk is the co-founder of PayPal, the most successful international payment system in the world.
- He is also the CEO of SpaceX, a revolutionary space exploration and technology developer.
- Most recently, he also became the CEO of Tesla, the pioneer in autonomous vehicles.
- Did we mention he is worth more than $250 billion? That is a lot of zeros, and they make him the richest person in the world today.
Honestly, he might have the most impressive CV anybody has ever seen, but what we care about are his NFT movements.
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Elon Musk’s NFT History
It is no secret that Elon Musk is a huge supporter of cryptocurrency and is heavily invested in Bitcoin. Tesla, one of the multi-billion dollar companies Musk happens to be in charge of, recently bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and aims to accept it as a form of payment for the cars they sell one day soon.
He also almost single-handedly turned Dogecoin from a spoof currency created as a joke into one of the biggest cryptocurrencies in the world. Each time he comments about it, the stocks go up.
Let’s face it, it was probably only a matter of time before Elon got involved in NFTs one way or another, especially since his wife, Grimes, made almost $6 million selling her music as NFTs through Nifty Gateway (a popular marketplace).
He has yet to actually drop an NFT for sale, despite that million-dollar offer for one of his tweets, but he does claim to have some work underway. More on that later.
Has Elon Musk Bought or Sold and NFTs?
Strangely enough, no, he hasn’t. The bulk of his involvement in the industry is through his iconic status and other people using him as inspiration for their own collections. Again, more on that later.
The closest Musk came to selling an NFT was in early 2021 when he announced that one of his tweets would go up for auction as a minted NFT. It did not take long for the bids to reach seven figures, topping out at around $1,100,000. After a while, Musk apparently changed his mind and decided that selling the tweet “felt wrong.” Each to their own, Elon, each to their own.
Fast forward a while, and he has announced the impending arrival of a new NFT in the form of a techno song about NFTs. Are you still with me? A song about NFTs created by Elon Must is going to be sold as an NFT, sort of like NFT inception, and probably worth a lot of money.
That $20,000 Tweet
As we mentioned, some of Elon Musk’s most prolific connections to NFTs were not by choice. In 2021, Musk shared a meme made by another Twitter user, which quickly gathered a lot of likes from his more than 60 million followers.
The quick-thinking meme creator minted the meme as an NFT and subsequently sold it less than two days later for just shy of $20,000.
Dogs of Elon
This NFT series released via the Dogecoin blockchain is essentially dedicated to Elon Musk since he played such a significant (although tiny) role in helping the memecoin make it big.
The collection includes thousands of tokens featuring the famous Doge Shiba Inu in various styles, as well as a few rare pixelated Elon Musk tokens. They follow a very similar style to CryptoPunk and are meant to be the memecoin answer to the wildly successful series.
Elon Musk himself is yet to comment on the series, despite the collection being close to sold out.
Final Thoughts
At the moment, Elon Musk’s involvement in NFTs is almost entirely peripheral, and it is not clear whether or not he is likely to ever properly get involved. Despite talking about selling NFTs, he has never actually done it, and in a recent tweet, he kind of threw out a little bit of shade about the whole idea of NFTs “jpeging the dollar.” Who knows: the eccentric and controversial centi-billionaire is full of surprises, so we may still get to see some action yet.