There is another thing here worth looking at: the use of the proceeds from this auction. Jimmy Wales posted the following rather non-committal statement on his English Wikipedia talk page:

"I'm planning to donate a significant portion and use a significant portion for wt.social. I haven't made any final decisions. I offered to pledge to donate to the WMF, but they (the board) preferred that I not do that."

Source link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AJimbo... – see also statement on proceeds at https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/birth-wikipedia/jimmy-wal...

Readers will note that this pledge is very deliberately phrased to leave all options open. It could mean 95% for WT.Social and 5% for charity, or vice versa, for example.

WT.Social (current Alexa rank around 120,000) is Jimmy Wales' commercial enterprise and the successor to the failed Wikitribune for-profit site established in April 2017. Wikitribune Ltd.'s filing history (incl. financial statements), as linked on WT.Social's "About" page, is here:

Source link: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Reading the above pledge, I was reminded of a previous pledge Jimmy Wales had made to support worthy causes.

Wales and Berners-Lee (who, incidentally, also auctioned an NFT recently) shared a controversial $1M award from the United Arab Emirates (each receiving $500K) in 2014.

Source link: https://web.archive.org/web/20191107063546/https://www.middl...

Following a row on his talk page, when editors accused Wales of legitimising an oppressive regime, Wales told the Daily Dot that he "never planned to keep the money and will use the funds to start his own foundation dedicated to furthering human rights."

Source link: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/jimmy-wales-uae-prize-money/

Trying to establish now, seven years on, whether the pledge was kept, I found that a Twitter account for the Jimmy Wales Foundation (@JWalesF) was set up in January 2015, soon after the Daily Dot report.

Two-and-a-half years later, in September 2017, Jimmy Wales did incorporate a "Jimmy Wales Foundation". Its filing history is here:

Source link: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

According to its certificate of incorporation, available in the filing history, the "Jimmy Wales Foundation" is a "private company limited by guarantee". It does not appear to be a charity. A search of the UK Register of Charities for the Jimmy Wales Foundation draws a blank:

Source link: https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/chari...

Section 24 of the certificate of incorporation states that the Jimmy Wales Foundation's "directors are entitled to such remuneration as the directors determine". This remuneration may "take any form." Jimmy Wales is the only director listed in the document.

The foundation's first financial statement after incorporation lists assets of £25,319 (around $30,000). More recent statements show a negative balance.

I was left wondering: Where did the other $470,000 go?

Looking into what the Jimmy Wales Foundation has achieved since its inception, I found that it had made 1,267 tweets, with the last one of these occurring in February 2019. A Google News search finds less than a dozen mentions of the Jimmy Wales Foundation in the media.

A number of these are mentions of Orit Kopel, the co-founder of WT.Social, who also describes herself as the Ex-CEO of the Jimmy Wales Foundation on Twitter.

Given the size of the original award, this seems on the face of it remarkably modest value for money in terms of the fight for human rights.

As the Daily Dot reported, Wales promised that "every penny of the money will be used to combat human rights abuses worldwide with a specific focus on the Middle East and with a specific focus of freedom of speech/access to knowledge issues."

Of course – and I hope this is the case – there may have been other activities consistent with this pledge that are not reflected in the Jimmy Wales Foundation's filing history. However, Jimmy Wales seems to be unwilling to answer questions about this. I asked him on the Wikimedia mailing list several days ago – no reply.

Maybe others would like to contact him on his user talk page in Wikipedia (linked in the Vice piece) to see if he’s willing to provide answers there.