Elon Musk Slams Twitter’s NFT Launch, Uses Social Platform To Announce His Grievance

Elon Musk had some harsh words about the debut of verified NFT profile pictures on Twitter (TWTR) early Friday morning.

The Tesla CEO posted a tweet on the social media platform that said the launch of non-fungible tokens was “annoying.”

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it would start allowing iOS users of its social media platform that subscribe to its Twitter Blue service to use NFTs as their profile picture.

The NFTs, as explained by Twitter, appear in a “special hexagon shape” versus circular profile pictures, that are owned by the user, where proof of ownership is stored on a blockchain or digital database that is publicly accessible. Users will need to connect their crypto wallet to choose an NFT as their profile picture, Twitter said.

Musk, who has a net worth of $256 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, went on to criticize the move by Twitter, saying in another post, “Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?”

Musk, who has 71 million followers on Twitter, gained support from his legion of fans.

A number of his followers expressed concern over the rollout of the NFT program by Twitter, with several asking Musk to just buy the social platform.

Musk’s skepticism about the move by Twitter has a long history as he has been impersonated by a number of cryptocurrency scammers on the social site, forcing the platform to block users who used his profile name in 2018, Business Insider reported.

Musk, who has been a long supporter of cryptocurrency, announced earlier in January that he would begin accepting Dogecoin payment for some Tesla merchandise.

The decision to accept Dogecoin didn’t come as a surprise for some, as Musk has been quite open about his acceptance of the coin on Twitter, often seemingly causing the currency to surge with a single tweet.

As of Friday's premarket hours, shares of Twitter were trading at $36.94, down 34 cents, or 0.91%.