CEO of Malaysian blockchain company is winning bidder in auction launched by Twitter co-founder.
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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Apple’s growth engine is showing signs of slowing, as rising costs, weaker services growth and AI competition challenge its profitability. With John Ternus taking the helm, the pressure is on to reignite innovation and sustain investor confidence.
3 min
The Apple growth and profit machine is wavering, and the boost from price increases might not be enough to keep it going at historic rates. That dials up the pressure on Apple’s new chief executive, John Ternus.
The company saved the bad news for its earnings call, an hour after it posted its results for the September quarter, projecting that for the current quarter its high-margin services business will continue to slow and that its widely watched gross profit margin will continue to fall.
Apple AAPL -1.83%decrease; down pointing triangle shares had been flat in post-close trading but declined as much as 4% after the company made the projections, which fell short of Wall Street estimates.
The impact of high memory costs are weighing even more heavily on the company, Ternus and Apple Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh said on the company’s earnings call. Apple has stockpiled cheaper components purchased earlier, but those inventories are dwindling.
When Ternus took over as Apple’s third chief executive of the past 29 years on Sept. 1, he inherited sky-high expectations. The men he followed were among the most successful company leaders in American business history. Steve Jobs revolutionized consumer devices multiple times. Tim Cook expanded Jobs’s creation to spectacular heights.
The expectations are reflected in Apple’s huge valuation. Oppenheimer analyst Martin Yang noted that Apple stock trades at 36 times next year’s expected earnings, a premium to the overall market, even though its earnings are only expected to grow 1%, which is slower than its tech peers.
“We see insufficient upside to justify the premium,” Yang wrote in an investor note, adding that Apple needs to boost iPhone sales growth and turn around its slowing services business to make him more bullish.
Investors have bid up Apple shares because it has been a port in the AI storm—a reliable and capital-efficient business that stands apart from rivals which are spending hundreds of billions of dollars racing to the AI frontier.
While others invest in data centers, Apple has been pouring its own cash into buybacks and dividends. But that safety may be challenged if Ternus can’t speed up Apple’s innovation engine.
Apple’s lagging performance in AI was evident when its new “Siri AI” chatbot arrived this past quarter. Its long-maligned assistant was already stale the day it arrived, surpassed by agents such as Instinct and Muse that can complete multistep tasks for consumers, while Siri still sets kitchen timers.
Apple needs to give people reasons to buy its devices as they get more expensive. The company raised prices across the board last quarter to help offset higher costs. Without compelling new features, a big question is whether consumers will slow the frequency of iPhone upgrades.
The new iPhone Duo appears to be a bright spot. Consumers are scooping up the $1,999 foldable smartphone despite mixed reviews—so many that Apple can’t keep up with demand. Shipping dates jumped out to January soon after the device went on sale, a disappointment for the normally reliable Apple supply chain.
Apple said its revenue grew 12% in the September quarter, slightly ahead of Wall Street’s expectations. Its widely tracked gross profit margin, at 47.9%, also came in just ahead of analyst estimates.
Apple will need to find new growth avenues because a reliable engine during the Cook era—the services business—is slowing. Courts and regulators worldwide have limited Apple’s ability to charge developers big fees to distribute apps through its App Store, the biggest component of the company’s services segment.
One of its most lucrative App Store fee generators has been the ChatGPT app from OpenAI. Around the time Apple accused OpenAI of trade-secret theft this past summer, OpenAI began redirecting potential subscribers to pay via its website instead of the App Store, skirting Apple’s tollbooth.
Apple’s valuation has bumped up against a ceiling in recent weeks. Six times it traded above a $5 trillion market capitalization intraday before finally closing above the threshold, which it has already fallen back below.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Apple services.
