Of all the things we have seen being sold as a non-fungible token (NFT), a handwritten letter by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been put up for auction as an NFT. The sale includes both a physical copy of the letter and a digital version. The letter, according to reports, had been written by Jobs t=around the same time that he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon in the United States (US). This was three years before he founded Apple, which is now one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Interestingly, the application doesn’t actually mention what role Jobs was applying for, or even at what company. It’s possible that this is sort of a template that Jobs wrote for applying to multiple companies after he dropped out of college. He joined legendary video game firm Atari in 1974, working there as a technician. This is where he met Steve Wozniak, with whom he founded Apple in 1976.
At the time of writing this story, the auction had received 18 bids and was priced at $32,000 (approximately Rs. 23.8 lakh). But the auction also had over five days left, meaning bids will continue and the price should swell even more. It is set to close on July 28, and this is the second time this letter has been put up for auction. The physical version of the letter had been auctioned for a whopping £162,000 (approximately Rs. 1.6 crore) in March 2021, by auction house Charterfields. It had also been sold for $175,000 in 2018, which is equal to approximately Rs. 1.2 crore.
The price of the letter is very clearly increasing with each new auction, so it’s possible that the current owner too is looking to make a quick earning by adding the NFT angle to the sale. For the uninitiated, NFTs are blockchain-based digital tokens, which signify the ownership of a digital item. Tim Berners Lee had recently used NFTs to sell the Internet’s source code, while artists have used them to sell digital art for millions of dollars.
