Elon Musk Brings Back His Wild NFT Avatar Moment

Elon Musk has brought one of his strangest cryptocurrency-era social media moments back into the spotlight.

The centibillionaire has revisited the time he briefly turned his Twitter profile into what looked like a Bored Ape Yacht Club showcase.

The billionaire reacted with a simple “lol” to an X post from the popular Dogecoin-focused account, which shared an old screenshot of Musk’s profile.

The screenshot takes users back to May 2022. Back then, Musk abruptly replaced his usual profile picture with a collage filled with Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.

Musk was already one of the most influential figures in cryptocurrency markets at the time. However, the Tesla CEO had not actually announced that he had joined the Bored Ape club. Instead, he simply trolled the $NFT sector.

Musk’s infamous Bored Ape avatar

On May 4, 2022, Musk changed his Twitter profile picture to a collage featuring dozens of Bored Ape Yacht Club characters.

Bored Ape #5809, a gold-furred ape wearing blue glasses, was at the center of the aforementioned collage.

It was a promotional collage created for Sotheby’s 2021 “Ape In!” auction.

Michael Bouhanna, who was then Sotheby’s co-head of digital art, publicly asked Musk either to remove the image or credit him for creating the collage.

The billionaire did not engage with the request. “I dunno … seems kinda fungible,” he quipped.

Musk had simply taken an image containing expensive NFTs and turned it into his own profile picture without buying anything.

The stunt therefore played into one of the most common criticisms of $NFT collectibles: anyone could still download, copy, or screenshot the image.

Musk eventually replaced the Bored Ape collage with his previous profile picture.

ApeCoin, the token associated with the broader Bored Ape ecosystem, surged by roughly 20% after Musk changed his avatar.

This was not the first time Musk mocked the sector. In late 2021, he posted a meme questioning whether NFTs were even real.

NFTs went from a relatively niche blockchain experiment to one of the biggest speculative crazes in cryptocurrency during 2021. CryptoPunks, Bored Apes, Art Blocks and countless other collections became highly speculative digital status symbols.

The frenzy continued into early 2022 before crashing rapidly.

Four years after one of the strangest episodes of the $NFT boom, the centibillionaire appears to be doing exactly what he did the first time: laughing at it.