Musk crowned 'Technoking' at Tesla

NEW YORK: Electric carmaker Tesla has crowned its brash billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk with a new title: Technoking.

And Zach Kirkhorn, the company's chief financial officer, will now be known as "Master of Coin," Tesla said Monday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The company did not say whether the new titles, which are effective immediately, would bring with them any additional duties.

However, "Elon and Zach will also maintain their respective positions as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer," the filing stated.

Norm-shattering entrepreneur Musk, who has more than 41 million followers on Twitter and a fortune now estimated at more than $180 billion, has had frequent conflicts with regulators at the SEC and is not shy about tweaking them on social media.

In 2018, the SEC charged Musk with fraud, slapped him with a $20 million fine and demanded he step down as Tesla chairman after he tweeted out a plan to take the company private.

The entrepreneur also waded in Monday to the new online fascination with digital art forms known as "NFTs," virtual objects that can be sold with a certificate of authenticity proving that they are, in theory, non-piratable thanks to the blockchain technology that was popularized by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

Musk announced on his Twitter account that he would be selling a video clip of techno music about NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, as an NFT.

The cryptocurrency website Cointelegraph said bidding on the NFT had risen to $100,000 in the first hour after Musk made the announcement, even though Musk has not actually put the song on the market yet.

US media reported that his partner, the Canadian singer Grimes, recently auctioned off NFT packages combining audiovisual content with unpublished music for a total of $6 million.