It's not that they didn't know.... It's well...

There was a time when Russia had an Occultic Research Department, and America got one. Did anyone actually believe in Magick? Did anyone wanna take the chance to be the guy who laughed at magick only to see America brought to its knees by something "Close enough" to psychic spies? Well that situation, no matter how unlikely would be worth a demotion.

Eventually it became a contest to see which nation could get the other to overspend their budgets on healing crystals.

Allegedly the CIA got some real psychic shit involved with project Star Gate, but.... ehh.... can anyone other than the CIA get magick to work? No, so....

My point is, it's not that they thought NFTs were this goldmine. They were worried about being left outside the gate if the hype paid off.

Ya gotta remember, these people do not know market trends, they do not know computers. They know "My great grandkid talks about this Video Game thing, maybe we should do a Nintendo? get Atari on the phone!"

I'm sure more of those companies were aware that it's a shitty idea than you're giving credit for. That doesn't matter though, what matters is whether they can convince other people to pay for it before everyone else figures that out. Most marketing is about getting people to buy shit that they wouldn't buy otherwise, this is no different.

They saw what happened to cryptocurrency and they were not willing to pass on the next new thing called "crypto" using a similar technology. With bitcoin producing results many tens of thousands of percent in increased value it was something they were all willing to commit to.

Had cryptocurrency not happened the NFT concept simply wouldn't have drawn the interest it did.

I sometimes think that FOMO in the tech world is a real fear that keeps these tech execs up at night. Even if it was obvious dumb bullshit I think a lot of these guys have seen so many tech empires rise and fall so rapidly to the point they're barely even remembered and I think there's a fear that they could be the next short sighted dummy who writes off the new technology as a fad and completely misses out on the next game changer.

They saw the opportunity to make a quick buck and went for it.

Laugh all you like, but there's money to be made and they won't stop until you pay for memes.