Elon Musk is no lover of the metaverse. In the weeks after Mark Zuckerberg’s car-crash marketing movie about the virtual future, Musk gave the big thumbs-down to the idea of life with a “TV on your nose.”

This, I’m sorry to say, is where the world’s wealthiest billionaire and I part company. While I have no intention of doing anything that brings extra wealth to the “eye of Sauron,” as Zuckerberg’s own employees apparently call him, I have been a sucker for all things VR since at least the days of The Lawnmower Man. Give me the bandwidth and sufficiently capable hardware and I’ll be there quicker than you can say Ready Player Vass.

This makes me a natural enthusiast for most innovations in that direction, not least NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are designed to let us buy and sell items online in a way that is reliable and doesn’t depend on any third party. For metaverse purposes, this is how we’ll buy everything from stripey avatar socks to the stupidly expensive supernova artwork that you’re going to want to hang in your virtual hallway.

But as Indiana University lawyer João Marinotti explains, the law has a little catching up to do first. It turns out that most digital items are only as good as your membership of whatever virtual world they are designed for. Read the small print and what you’re buying is basically a bunch of useless zeroes and ones.

As for the Muskmeister, he seems a bit more amenable to NFTs than to the metaverse. But naturally, we’ve been more focused on his Twitter takeover lately. Among a slew of great discussions over the past few days, we’ve looked at why his plans to bring more "free speech” to Twitter are not legally workable, and what his tussle with the (old) management says about corporate boards in 2022.