By Nick Dove – Heritage Global Partners, Inc.
Around 3:00pm on December 9th, I started packing up my things to head home for the weekend. It was getting to be that awkward seasonal time where everyone was saying “Happy Holidays” way too early and needlessly delaying things until January.
As I was shutting down my computer an email came through from a reporter at MarketWatch. Normally, all of us auctioneers love it when a reporter reaches out about an upcoming sale, but this one threw me off though, as the questions were uncommon: “Can you confirm who specifically hired you? For what reason did they hire you? And who specifically will get the proceeds?” As I started typing a response, my phone rang. It was another reporter, this time from Fortune Magazine. 
A week before, we had been engaged by Twitter for a sale of surplus office assets from their headquarters. They had secured vast office space in San Francisco prior to the pandemic and in this “work from home” era, they realized they could consolidate some of their office space. At the time, Twitter was in the news daily, as Elon Musk had just purchased it. We hadn’t even begun marketing the auction yet, but somehow the media found out and assumed an auction meant doom and gloom for Twitter and Elon. It was a media race to be the quickest headline to pronounce that.
I explained to Fortune that auctions of corporate assets are extremely common. I gave the reporter an extensive list of our clients, including Adidas, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Danone, Hormel, and Honeywell. I told her that we were conducting our 121st auction for Pfizer in a few days. I explained that most large companies routinely sell surplus assets and Twitter wasn’t doing anything unusual. I even mentioned to her (and sent her a catalog link to a sale) that Twitter had already held an auction from a UK office about a year prior to Elon’s tenure. But none of these statements seemed to resonate.
The reporter said she “had heard” Twitter was in financial distress and asked if I could confirm the reason for the auction was because Elon was out of money and needed to sell things to pay off the loan he took out to buy Twitter. I asked if she had seen our auction catalog, which she hadn’t. I explained that we were selling a few hundred lots of desks and chairs and coffee machines and anyone who thought our auction revenue could help offset the $44 Billion dollar purchase price was a “moron.” 
We ended the call shortly after and she said it didn’t seem like there was a big story here given what I had shared, and that the event probably wasn’t even newsworthy. I finished packing up my things, but no less than 5 minutes later, she emailed me saying her boss wanted to run with the story anyways and she thanked me for my time. I left the office at about 4:00pm and at that time there were 150 registered bidders. When I got home 10 minutes later, I received a Google Alert about the sale – Fortune had published their story, which prominently featured my “moron” quote. 
I read the article and checked the sale. There were now 300 registered bidders. It had doubled in about 20 minutes on a Friday afternoon. The ensuing virality is impossible to describe. That night when I went to bed there were 700 bidders and when I woke up we had 1,100. I went out to breakfast and returned with 1,500 bidders. By bedtime Saturday we were at 2,500 which became 3,500 Sunday morning. By bedtime Sunday it was 5,100 and 6,500 when I woke up Monday.
Every time you refreshed the page the number would jump. At the office on Monday, we took bets handicapping and set the over/under at 8,000 registrants before the end of the work day, which we blew by. In the 72-hour period from Friday afternoon with the interview until Monday afternoon, we gained over 7,700 registered bidders. It was 106 bidders per hour, or 1.77 per minute. Over that 3-day period, we gained a new registrant every 34 seconds!
But it didn’t stop there. ABC News, CBS News, Vice, and TMZ all picked up the story. As did every local and regional media outlet you could ever think of from newspapers to radio, and TV news stations. Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show featured a segment on the sale and even used our catalog photos. A story about the auction was on the HOMEPAGE of CNN’s website. But it wasn’t just a story about Twitter, or Elon, or the auction. For some perplexing reason my “moron” comment was the soundbite and the fuel that kept things going.
Friends, family, and colleagues would randomly stumble upon various publications on their own and reach out to me saying they came across the story and my quote. Our very own IAA president, Shira Weissman, even texted me one morning from Israel having seen the “moron” quote. It was truly a quote heard around the world. At some point the story somehow pivoted and things got even weirder as the narrative shifted from Elon to us, and me. A publication (that probably nobody has ever heard of) called the East Coast Daily in India wrote an article and the HEADLINE was “Nick Dove, HGP’s head reacts to Musk’s plan to auction off all the extra items from Twitter HQ.” They wrote that… as if any single reader knew or cared who I was or if anything I would say could possibly be deemed important by their audience. Inadvertently I became an unofficial spokesman for Twitter.
The San Francisco Chronicle (the Bay Area’s largest newspaper) put out a tweet that said, “Anyone who thinks the sales will cover Twitter’s cost cutting measure is “a moron.” Every news organization or media outlet you could think of reached out for additional comments. Everybody wanted their own spin from the guy with the hot takes. In the seven-day span from Friday at 3pm when I spoke to Fortune to the following Friday at 3pm, we gained more than 15,000 registered bidders. We averaged a new bidder every 40 seconds, for more than seven straight days.
Just think about that for a second: every 40 seconds, every day, for an entire week, a new person registered to bid.
It was insane.
In the office, we were all positive the auction would be cancelled at any moment. Every incoming call or email felt like it had to be Twitter brass telling us we couldn’t proceed anymore. But they never reached out to cancel. We can only guess they saw the headlines and liked the “moron” quote.
The auction was conducted in January with just shy of 30,000 bidders. It was absurdly fun, but tremendously overwhelming. If 10% of the bidders called that meant our office had to answer 3,000 phone calls (and way more than 10% of the people called). The phone would ring, we’d answer a question, hang up, and immediately it would ring again with someone essentially asking the same question.
The sale was shaping up to be pure chaos, so we had to be proactive. We decided to send FAQ email blasts to the daily or weekly registrants to get ahead of their inevitable questions. We had several calls with Bidspotter to ensure proper protocols were in place to handle the traffic and load to their site. To Bidspotter’s credit (specifically Dan Pennington and Austin Lamm), they were hugely supportive in the lead up to the sale, as well as during the chaos on auction day.
There were 30,000 bidders at the sale and with the interest of every media organization imaginable, the sale had the brightest of spotlights on it. Although it was our auction, Bidspotter was front and center in it with us since it was being conducted on their platform with their technology. Fortunately, the sale went as flawlessly as we could have hoped. Although we only use Bidspotter for about a third of our sales, we must acknowledge they were an excellent partner for this one.
The auction itself was a spectacle with nonsensical prices on everything and multiple celebrities & famous athletes bidding. The proceeds exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations with a seven-digit outcome. We even applied for the Guinness Record for online auction participation, but we couldn’t formalize it due to some technicalities, unfortunately (Guinness did not disagree with our record, though).
It was a once in a career type of event—or so we thought—until 6 months later when Twitter changed their name to ‘X’ and wanted to do a Sale #2 to get rid of even more office goodies. It was déjà vu with the media circus once again, but this time nobody was called a moron and the story fizzled out after a couple days. Still, that sale had nearly 4,000 bidders and a fantastic pricing outcome as well. But it was just a walk in the park by comparison.
It’s tough to imagine an auction situation that will ever compare. Maybe one day we’ll sell Jeff Bezos’ yacht, or Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate, or memorabilia from Yankee Stadium and get the same type of mass media interest with 30,000 bidders. It takes true lightning in a bottle to capture a company so newsworthy, with assets desirable to the masses, and a “moron” like me for the catchy soundbite.
It may be quite a while, if ever, before we get another sale like that. So, in the meantime it’s back to the day-to-day business. We look forward to a bright future doing deals and partnering with everyone… so give us a call if you’re in need of us morons to help.