What Makes Bored Ape NFTs So Desirable?
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What Makes Bored Ape NFTs So Desirable?

Purchased by celebrities from Justin Bieber to Gwyneth Paltrow these digital avatars promise a vaunted place in the metaverse.

By SOPHIE HAIGNEY
Fri, Feb 25, 2022 1:58pmGrey Clock 4 min

On The Tonight Show in late January, Jimmy Fallon held up a portrait of a cartoon ape wearing a sailor’s hat, a striped shirt and heart-shaped sunglasses. “This is my ape,” he said, as his guest, Paris Hilton, gave it her approval. She also had an ape, which Fallon had earlier shown the audience, a red-furred version wearing sunglasses and an S&M cap. “We’re part of the same community,” Fallon said. “We’re both apes.”

This odd moment between Hilton and Fallon hurtled Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of NFTs depicting apes, into the spotlight. Other celebrities were showing off theirs too: In January, Justin Bieber posted a photo on Instagram of his Bored Ape #3001, sometimes called Lonely Bored Ape, which relates to his song “Lonely.” (This ape’s eyes are filled with tears.) Bieber paid $1.29 million for it, according to Etherscan, which tracks blockchain transactions, then went on to purchase a second for $470,000. For many observers, these were record-scratch moments in the middle of a long-running party, the kind of thing that made one wonder: What is going on?

Bored Ape Yacht Club was born in the heady days of April 2021, when the value of cryptocurrency skyrocketed and the market for NFTs exploded. NFT (short for nonfungible token) is a unit of data stored on a blockchain, allowing for a record of who owns what to exist on a decentralized public ledger. Its four founders were pseudonymous, though BuzzFeed News recently identified two of them to be Greg Solano, 32, a writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, 35. The concept was simple: 10,000 apes, each with a distinct face and outfit, each able to be individually owned.

“The term ape is used affectionately in the crypto community to mean early adopters,” says Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs, which was part of the team that created the original ape NFTs, in an email. “We liked the idea of creating a whole collection around apes who became so wealthy because of crypto’s rise, that they became extremely…bored.” Buying an ape also gives one membership to an elite digital club—owners can hang out in Discord servers with like-minded Bored Ape enthusiasts.

A major appeal of Bored Apes is their use as avatars—many owners change their Twitter and WhatsApp and even LinkedIn display pictures to their apes. They draw less from the lo-fi early internet aesthetics of other NFT projects like CryptoPunks and more from comic books and Pokémon cards. The animated apes are frequently absurd; their fur might be cheetah print and their teeth rainbow. They stick out their tongues and smoke cigars and wear cowboy hats or fezzes or large sunglasses. Their use as avatars means the apes come to represent you, or something about you, in a specific digital realm. Last month, Gwyneth Paltrow bought one that, when animated, shows an ape with long blond hair that looks tacked on around its large ears, and big blue eyes—her own features transmuted onto a digital ape.

One reason some are willing to spend big on these apes is that they’re part of one’s outward representation in the burgeoning metaverse, as one might invest in an eye-catching coat or handbag in the physical world. “I’m sort of trying to commit to this being my identity for a while,” says Adam Draper, managing director of Boost VC, a fund that was an early investor in cryptocurrencies, who bought his ape about five months ago for an undisclosed sum that he characterized as “expensive.”

Buying a Bored Ape also means buying the underlying intellectual property to your specific ape’s image—which more and more people are capitalizing by licensing for comic books, film and TV, even licensing images to cannabis companies. Draper says Bored Ape Yacht Club will be “the next Disney.”

“It’s the Disney built by creators,” Draper says. “I believe it’s the fastest bootstrapped way to build IP.

“We are all a part of this community, this club, and we’re all trying to make our own apes more valuable, but by building a comic book series or making a movie or a sculpture, suddenly you’ve created value for the whole network.”

This network effect is what separates Bored Ape Yacht Club from other NFT projects. Athletes like Stephen Curry and Serena Williams, musicians like Eminem, Diplo and Future, and actors like Kevin Hart all own apes. (Many of the high-profile ape owners declined to comment for this article through their representatives.)

“Steph Curry was pretty early to Bored Apes, which makes sense because the NBA has already done partnerships like NBA Top Shot NFTs,” says Mason Nystrom, a senior research analyst at Messari, a crypto-market intelligence platform. “Once you get one celebrity or two, then you get 10, and there’s that flywheel effect.”

The rich and famous flocking to Bored Ape Yacht Club has prompted speculation that some are being given Bored Apes or are paid in exchange for promoting them. Many buy them through MoonPay, a fintech company that builds payment infrastructure for crypto and offers a “concierge service,” which handles the sometimes clunky process of buying NFTs for high-net-worth individuals (celebrities including Post Malone and Fallon have used it to get their Bored Apes). Justin Hamilton, a MoonPay spokesperson, says the service never involves giving Bored Apes to celebrities or paying them, and that it’s a fee-for-service business. Perhaps celebrities simply want them because other celebrities have them, he says.

“It has a lot of similar attributes of other scarce assets, so it’s developed a momentum of its own,” says Hamilton. “It’s sort of like asking, why did the latest Jordan drop become popular, or what’s the magic behind Supreme?”

A Bored Ape is, perhaps above all else, a strange status symbol for a highly particular subset of people.

“This is the Lamborghini of the digital world,” Draper says. “But it’s more effective, because you’re persistently online with it forever, but with a Lamborghini you’re not driving it forever.”



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Tech Giants Double Down on Their Massive AI Spending

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta pour billions into artificial intelligence, undeterred by DeepSeek’s rise

By NATE RATTNER AND JASON DEAN
Fri, Feb 7, 2025 3 min

Tech giants projected tens of billions of dollars in increased investment this year and sent a stark message about their plans for AI: We’re just getting started.

The four biggest spenders on the data centers that power artificial-intelligence systems all said in recent days that they would jack up investments further in 2025 after record outlays last year. Microsoft , Google and Meta Platforms have projected combined capital expenditures of at least $215 billion for their current fiscal years, an annual increase of more than 45%.

Amazon.com didn’t provide a full-year estimate but indicated on Thursday that total capex across its businesses is on course to grow to more than $100 billion, and said most of the increase will be for AI.

Their comments in recent quarterly earnings reports showed the AI arms race is still gaining momentum despite investor anxiety over the impact of China’s DeepSeek and whether these big U.S. companies will sufficiently profit from their unprecedented spending spree.

Investors have been especially shaken that DeepSeek replicated much of the capability of leading American AI systems despite spending less money and using fewer and less-powerful chips, according to its Chinese developer. Leaders of the U.S. companies were unbowed , touting advances in their own technology and arguing that lower costs will make AI more affordable and grow the demand for their cloud computing services, which AI needs to operate.

“We think virtually every application that we know of today is going to be reinvented with AI inside of it,” Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy said on Thursday’s earnings call.

Here is a breakdown of each company’s plans:

Amazon said a measure of its capex that includes leased equipment rose to a record of about $26 billion in the final quarter of 2024 , driven by spending in its cloud-computing division on equipment for data centers that host AI applications. Executives projected it would maintain the fourth-quarter spending volume in 2025, meaning an annual total of more than $100 billion by that measure.

The company—which gets most of its revenue from e-commerce and most of its profit from cloud computing—also projected overall sales for the current quarter that missed analysts’ expectations. Its shares slid about 4% in after-hours trading Thursday. The stock rose more than 40% in 2024 and was up nearly 9% this year before its earnings report.

Jassy said AI has the potential to propel historic change and that Amazon wants to be a leader of that progress.

“AI represents for sure the biggest opportunity since cloud and probably the biggest technology shift and opportunity in business since the internet,” Jassy said.

Google shares are down about 7% since its earnings report Tuesday, which showed disappointing growth in its cloud-computing business. Still, parent-company Alphabet said it is accelerating investments in AI data centers as part of a surge in capital expenditures this year to about $75 billion, from $52.5 billion in 2024. The spending will go to infrastructure both for Google’s own use and for cloud-computing clients.

“I think part of the reason we are so excited about the AI opportunity is we know we can drive extraordinary use cases because the cost of actually using it is going to keep coming down,” said CEO Sundar Pichai .

AI is “as big as it comes, and that’s why you’re seeing us invest to meet that moment,” he said.

Microsoft has said it plans to spend $80 billion on AI data centers in the fiscal year ending in June, and that spending would grow further next year , albeit at a slower pace.

Chief Executive Satya Nadella said AI will become much more extensively used , which he said is good news. “As AI becomes more efficient and accessible, we will see exponentially more demand,” Nadella said.

Growth for Microsoft’s cloud-computing business in the latest quarter also disappointed investors, leaving its stock down about 6% since its earnings report last week.

Meta, too, outlined a sizable increase in its investments driven by AI, including $60 billion to $65 billion in planned capital expenditures this year, roughly 70% higher than analysts had projected. Shares in Meta are up about 5% since its earnings report last week.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said investing vast sums will enable it to adjust the technology as AI advances.

“That’s generally an advantage that we’re now going to be able to provide a higher quality of service than others who don’t necessarily have the business model to support it on a sustainable basis,” he said.

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