Investing

Is a Tweet the Next Mona Lisa? Dorsey’s $2.9 Million Sale Raises Questions of Value

The Twitter founder’s first public message on the platform was bought by the head of a blockchain service. But what determines the worth of a digital scrawl?

Jack Dorsey speaks remotely during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2020.

Photographer: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Bloomberg

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It used to be that likes, comments, shares and such — rather than a price tag — represented the worth of tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos, Instagram pictures and other social-media ephemera.

But now there’s an emerging means of measuring their value: by the millions of dollars they fetch at auction.