Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet Sells As NFT For Approx. $3.7 Million
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Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet Sells As NFT For Approx. $3.7 Million

CEO of Malaysian blockchain company is winning bidder in auction launched by Twitter co-founder.

By Maria Armental
Tue, Mar 23, 2021 2:21pmGrey Clock 2 min

The first tweet that Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey posted to the microblogging site in 2006 has sold as a nonfungible token for about $2.9 million (A$3.7 million), the latest digital collectible to haul in more than US$1 million amid a flurry of interest from buyers.

The winning bidder, Malaysia-based blockchain company Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi, technically owns a digital certificate of the tweet—“just setting up my twttr,” according to Valuables, an NFT marketplace for buying and selling tweets that ran the auction. NFTs work on the blockchain, similar to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and serve as digital certificates of authenticity for everything from art to memes.

Mr Dorsey’s tweet itself will continue to live on Twitter, Valuables said, adding that the digital certificate is signed using cryptography and includes the tweet’s metadata such as when the tweet was posted.

“This is not just a tweet!” Mr Estavi tweeted Monday. “I think years later people will realise the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting.”

Mr Estavi couldn’t be immediately reached for comment on Monday. He was also the highest bidder to secure an NFT of a tweet from Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, but Mr Musk ultimately changed his mind.

Cryptocurrency investor Justin Sun, who paid a record US$4.6 million in a 2019 charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett, was the second-highest bidder for the NFT of Mr Dorsey’s first tweet.

A wide array of content creators have set their sights on the NFT market after Mike Winkelmann, a self-taught artist who goes by the professional name of Beeple, sold a digital image online at Christie’s for US$69.3 million, making him the third-most-expensive living artist after Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

The overall NFT market ballooned last year to at least US$338 million, from about US$41 million in 2018, according to NFT sales-tracking website NonFungible.com and L’Atelier, a research firm affiliated with BNP Paribas SA.

Mr Dorsey, a bitcoin advocate who also serves as CEO of Square Inc., launched the auction late last year, though bid values crossed the seven-figure mark over the past few weeks. The Twitter co-founder posted tweets showing auction proceeds being converted into bitcoin and sent to the nonprofit group GiveDirectly’s Africa Response project to offer emergency Covid-19 cash relief for families in Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia and Malawi.

Reprinted by permission of The Wall Street Journal, Copyright 2021 Dow Jones & Company. Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Original date of publication: March 22, 2021.



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Terrible commutes. Expensive child care. Employees explain why they will keep working from home.

By RAY A. SMITH
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What’s still keeping American workers out of the office?

At a time when restaurants, planes and concert arenas are packed to the rafters, office buildings remain half full. Thinly populated cubicles and hallways are straining downtown economies and, bosses say, fragmenting corporate cultures as workers lose a sense of engagement.

Yet workers say high costs, caregiving duties, long commutes and days still scheduled full of Zooms are keeping them at home at least part of the time, along with a lingering sense that they’re able to do their jobs competently from anywhere. More than a dozen workers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal say they can’t envision returning to a five-day office routine, even if they’re missing career development or winding up on the company layoff list.

Managers say they will renew the push to get employees back into offices later this year. The share of companies planning to keep office attendance voluntary, rather than mandatory, is dropping, according to a survey released in May of more than 200 corporate real-estate executives conducted by property-services firm CBRE, one of the largest managers of U.S. office space.

A battle of wills could be ahead. The gap between what employees and bosses want remains wide, with bosses expecting in-person collaboration and workers loath to forgo flexibility, according to monthly surveys of worker sentiment maintained by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who studies remote work.

Escalating expenses

One reason workers say they’re reluctant to return is money. Some who have lost remote-work privileges said they are spending hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars each month on meals, commutes and child care.

One supercommuter who treks to her Manhattan job from her home in Philadelphia negotiated a two-day-a-week limit to her New York office time this year. Otherwise, she said she could easily spend $10,000 a year on Amtrak tickets if she commuted five days a week.

Christos Berger, a 25-year-old mortgage-loan assistant who lives outside Washington, D.C., estimates she spends $2,100 on child care and $450 on gas monthly now that she is working up to three days a week in the office.

Berger and her husband juggled parenting duties when they were fully remote. The cost of office life has her contemplating a big ask: clearance to work from home full time.

“Companies are pushing you to be available at night, be available on weekends,” she said, adding that she feels employers aren’t taking into account parents’ need for family time.

Rachel Cottam, a 31-year-old head of content for a tech company, works full time from her home near Salt Lake City, making the occasional out-of-town trip to headquarters. She used to be a high-school teacher, spending weekdays in the classroom. Back then, she and her husband spent $100 a week on child care and $70 a week on gas. Now they save that money. She even let her car insurance company know she no longer commutes and they knocked $5 a month off the bill.

Friends who have been recalled to offices tell Cottam about the added cost of coffee, lunch and beauty supplies. They also talk about the emotional cost they feel from losing work flexibility.

“For them, it feels like this great ‘future of work’ they’ve been gifted is suddenly ripped away,” she said.

Parent trade-offs

If pandemic-era flexible schedules go away, a huge number of parents will drop out of the workforce, workers say.

When Meghan Skornia, a 36-year-old urban planner and married mother of an 18-month-old son, was looking for a new job last year, she weeded out job openings with strict in-office policies. Were she given such mandates, she said, she would consider becoming an independent consultant.

The firm in Portland, Ore., where Skornia now works requests one day a week in the office, but doesn’t dictate which day. The arrangement lets her spend time with her son and juggle her job duties, she said. “If I were in the office five days a week, I wouldn’t really ever see my son, except for weekends.”

Emotional labor

For some, coming into the office means donning a mask to fit in.

Kenneth Thomas, 42, said he left his investment-firm job in the summer of 2021 when the company insisted that workers return to the office full time. Thomas, who describes himself as a 6-foot-2 Black man, said managing how he was perceived—not slipping into slang or inadvertently appearing threatening through body language—made the office workday exhausting. He said that other professionals of colour have told him they feel similarly isolated at work.

“When I was working from home, it freed up so much of my mental bandwidth,” he said. His current job, treasurer of a green-energy company, allows him to work remotely two or three days a week.

Lost productivity

The longer the commute, the less likely workers are to return to offices.

Ryan Koch, a Berkeley, Calif., resident, went to his San Francisco office two days a week as required late last year, but then he let his attendance slide, because commuting to an office felt pointless. “I’m doing the same video calls that I can be doing at home,” he said.

Koch, who works in sales, said his nonattendance wasn’t noted so long as his numbers were good. When Koch and other colleagues were unable to meet sales quotas in recent weeks, they were laid off. Ignoring the in-office requirement probably didn’t help, he said, adding he hopes to land a new hybrid role where he goes in one or two days.

Jess Goodwin, a 36-year-old media-marketing professional, turned down an offer to go from freelance to full time earlier this year because the role required office time and no change in pay.

Goodwin said a manager “made it really clear that this is what they’re mandating right now and it could change in the future to ‘you have to be back in five days a week.’”

Goodwin, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., calculated that subway commutes to Midtown Manhattan would consume more than 150 hours annually, in addition to time spent getting ready for work.

Goodwin’s holding out for a better offer. She said she would consider a hybrid position if it came with a generous package and good commute, adding: “And I would also probably need something in my contract being like, ‘We’re not going to increase the number of days you have to come in.’”

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