In March 2021, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold an NFT of his first-ever tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” to Malaysia-based entrepreneur Sina Estavi for 1,630.58 ETH, worth about $2.9 million at the time. Dorsey converted the proceeds to bitcoin and donated them to GiveDirectly’s Africa fund. A year later, Estavi tried to resell the NFT through an open auction, asking $48 million. When bidding closed in April 2022, the highest offer was roughly $280, and Estavi refused to sell. The NFT changed nothing about the tweet itself, which still exists on Twitter/X for free. What Estavi bought was a signed, verifiable record of ownership. The case is widely cited as proof that an NFT’s price reflects buyer demand at a single moment, not a stable or transferable value.
The gap between those two numbers, $2.9 million and $280, is one of the clearest public examples of how NFT pricing actually works. It is less a story about a broken technology and more a story about what happens when a six-figure sale gets mistaken for a floor price.
What Sina Estavi actually bought
Dorsey’s tweet, posted on March 21, 2006, reads “just setting up my twttr.” It was never deleted, hidden, or made exclusive. Anyone can still view it on Twitter (now X) for free. What Estavi purchased was not the tweet, but a non-fungible token representing Dorsey’s signature and authentication of that specific tweet, sold through a platform called Valuables by Cent, which lets public figures auction off “autographed” versions of their posts.
The sale closed on March 22, 2021, with a winning bid of 1,630.5825601 ETH, reported at the time as $2,915,835.47, as confirmed by Cent and covered by CNBC. Under Valuables’ standard terms, Dorsey kept 95 percent of the proceeds and Cent kept 5 percent as a platform fee. Dorsey converted his share, 50.8751669 BTC at the time, and donated it to GiveDirectly’s Africa Response fund rather than keeping it.
This is a useful detail for understanding the case: the seller treated the sale as a one-off charitable stunt tied to his own fame, not as the launch of an ongoing collectible with resale infrastructure behind it. That distinction matters for what happened next.
The 2022 resale attempt that collapsed
In April 2022, Estavi announced he would auction the NFT and donate half the proceeds to charity, setting an asking price of $48 million, more than 16 times what he paid. He listed it on OpenSea and gave the auction a set window to close.
The results were not close to his target. According to CoinDesk’s reporting, only seven bids came in over the course of the auction, ranging from about $6 to $280. CNBC separately reported that the single highest bid recorded at any point that week reached just under $10,000, still a 99.6 percent drop from the original purchase price. When the auction’s deadline passed, Estavi declined to accept the top offer, telling CoinDesk he might hold out for a better one or might never sell. Public records of the NFT’s ownership history show it remained with Estavi rather than transferring to a new buyer.
No outlet has reported a completed sale at a higher price since. The NFT’s most recent confirmed market transaction remains the original $2.9 million purchase.
Why the price collapsed so fast
A few factors explain the gap, and none of them are unique to this one NFT.
Estavi’s $48 million asking price was a round multiple of his original cost, not a figure based on what similar “autographed tweet” NFTs had sold for on the resale market. No established secondary market existed for this type of collectible, so there was nothing to anchor a realistic price against.
The original sale also happened during the peak of 2021’s NFT buying frenzy, when first-mover novelty items, the first tweet, the first blog post, the first magazine cover minted as an NFT, drew intense bidding from collectors chasing historical firsts. By April 2022, that specific wave of demand had largely moved on, and the broader crypto market had already begun cooling.
On top of that, ownership of the token never included ownership of the underlying tweet. The post itself was always freely viewable and always will be, which limits how many buyers are willing to pay a premium for a signed version of something they can already read for free. And unlike a stock or a widely-traded collectible, this NFT had exactly one seller, no market makers, no comparable listings, and no liquidity beyond whoever happened to be browsing OpenSea that particular week.
What this case study teaches NFT buyers
The lesson usually drawn from this case is not that NFTs are inherently worthless, but that a single high-profile sale price tells you almost nothing about what an asset will fetch later. A few practical takeaways carry over to any NFT purchase:
A sale price is a snapshot of one buyer’s willingness to pay at one moment, driven by whatever attention or narrative existed that week. It is not a valuation, and it does not predict future demand. If you are new to judging what a given NFT might actually be worth to you versus the market, our guide on how to know what an NFT is worth walks through the difference between hype-driven pricing and durable value.
Buying an NFT tied to a public figure’s content does not transfer rights to that content. Estavi never owned Dorsey’s tweet, and no NFT purchase removes a post from the original platform or gives the buyer control over it. For a broader look at what an NFT purchase does and doesn’t include, see what you actually own when you buy an NFT.
Resale liquidity is never guaranteed, even for items with real cultural significance. The first tweet is a genuinely historic piece of internet history, arguably more historically notable than most NFT collectibles that trade for far more today, and it still produced bids under $300 when its owner tried to sell. Collections with active trading communities and transparent price histories behave very differently from one-off celebrity items, which is worth remembering before treating any single past sale as a reliable benchmark.
Where the NFT stands today
As of the most recent public reporting, Estavi still holds the token. He has not announced a completed sale at any price since the failed 2022 auction, and no major outlet has reported a change of ownership. The tweet continues to exist on X exactly as it always has, unaffected by who holds the NFT tied to it.
The case remains one of the most-cited examples in NFT discourse specifically because the numbers are so stark and so well documented: a verified $2.9 million purchase, an attempted $48 million resale, and a final bid of $280. Few other public examples make the risk of treating a single sale as an appraisal this concrete.
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