Elon Musk is promoting Bored Ape?
Known in the crypto ecosystem for his extravagances and ambiguous tweets leading to strong surges in certain tokens like DogeCoin or Shiba, the billionaire does not hesitate to share his thoughts on Twitter without caring about the consequences.
The reaction of the crypto market is very often instantaneous, while the latter, extremely volatile, only seems to wait for this kind of slight spark to ignite in one direction or another.
Today, it is on the side of NFT that Elon Musk has turned to have fun with his audience. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX first discreetly changed his Twitter profile picture for an image composed of a large number of NFT Bored Ape, each more rare than the other.
Quickly, the Web 3 community realized the change and the information moved in a few minutes on the social network recently bought by the same billionaire.
Before anyone could say that Elon Musk had bought NFT, the sales volume of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club collections exploded. The price of the APE token, linked to Yuga Labs’ BAYC ecosystem, was also soaring, with a surge of almost 15% in a few minutes.
Did Elon Musk buy these Bored Ape?
Quickly, the interested party posted a tweet suggesting that he simply wanted to poke fun at the so-called “unfungible” NFT technology by showing that he could own and use the image often confused with the NFT itself:
Just as prices spike when Elon Musk indirectly promotes a project or not, those same prices can quickly plummet when he speaks out.
The price of the APE token then experienced a very quick 15% drop to its original level, while the Bored Ape and Mutant NFTs suffered the same fate.
Indeed, some of the Bored Ape present on the image still used by Elon Musk today belong to reputable members of the BAYC community. There is no doubt that the billionaire does not own all the NFTs present on his profile picture and his humorous tweet suggests that he does not actually own any.
Did Musk buy a Bored Ape? The NFT community is investigating
Before Elon promoted DogeCoin and got involved with the project, he was making fun of it. The same pattern happened with Bitcoin and Shiba and it wouldn’t be impossible for Musk to actually own a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, while making fun of the technology. His “troll” behavior is not new and some members of the Web 3 community suspect the entrepreneur of owning several rather rare BAYC NFTs.
One avid Bored Ape collector shared an interesting tweet on the evening of Tuesday, May 3, hours before Elon Musk changed his profile picture to Bored Apes:
The same Twitter account had posted the image used by Musk a few days earlier while celebrating the Yacht Club’s anniversary.
Musk was also spotted with the executives of MoonPay, the company allowing many celebrities to purchase their first Bored Apes and most recently Guy Oseary, the former manager of Madonna and the band U2, currently working with the studio Yuga Labs. The latter also retweeted Elon’s latest post, which was considered a mockery of NFTs.
The meeting with MoonPay on February 26 also coincides with the movement to the same wallet 22 days ago of 6 of the rarest Bored Ape being present in the chosen image.
To complete the panoply of clues feeding the wildest theories, we can also remember that Elon Musk had put his own NFT on sale a little over a year ago:
“I’m putting this music about NFTs on sale”
