Samuel Chatwin bought covfefe.co.nz for no other reason than because he could. Photo/supplied
Samuel Chatwin bought covfefe.co.nz for no other reason than because he could. Photo/supplied
In a world saturated with covfefe memes, a Kiwi man leapt to register the domain name covfefe.co.nz after US President Donald Trump's misspelt tweet went viral this week.
Auckland wine salesman Samuel Chatwin shelled out a modest $22.99 for his slice of Twitter history, something he considers a small price to pay.
"It wasn't a very expensive sort of thing," he said.
"Someone may potentially want it in the future, maybe they won't. For $22.99 it doesn't really matter."
The word "covfefe" earned its claim to fame when Trump tweeted on May 31: "Despite the constant negative press covfefe".
Donald Trump set covfefe trending on May 31. The tweet has since been deleted. Photo/Twitter
The perplexing message, which appeared to be a half-written sentence with 'coverage' misspelt, quickly went viral, gaining hundreds of thousands of retweets and likes.
Chatwin said he registered the domain name a couple of days after the infamous tweet.
"Yeah, so Donald Trump basically tweeted that really interesting spelling mistake and so automatically I sort of thought to myself, 'Well that is quite an interesting spelling mistake, so someone is going to be grabbing that domain pretty quickly.'"
He first looked for covfefe.com, but that had been snapped up. He considered .com.au and .co.uk, but instead decided to get the .co.nz domain.
Chatwin and his friends are in their early 30s, and "find memes really entertaining".
"When I saw that tweet, I just cracked up. I couldn't stop laughing - what the hell does that even mean? It just didn't make sense. Then I sort of said to myself, I said to my friends: 'when life gives you lemons, covfefe.'"
He wasn't sure if he would sell the domain.
"Depending on the offer, if someone said to me today 'Oh, would you let it go for a couple of grand', I would definitely consider."
There's not much to see at covfefe.co.nz, except for some advertisements to help the site visitor buy it if they're keen.
Other options still available include covfefe.org.nz and covfefe.net.nz.
