Mike Winkelmann, 40, known professionally as Beeple, is a digital artist whose work includes short films, VJ loops, and “everyday’s,” a practice of creating a new piece each day, which he has done consecutively now for nearly 15 years. A compilation of that work, “Everyday’s: The First 5000 Days,” sold as an NFT, or non-fungible token, at auction in 2021 for $69 million — one of the most expensive NFTs sold and third-highest price paid for the work of any living artist. He lives in Charleston, S.C., with his wife and children.

His newfound wealth gave Winkelmann the freedom to dream big. His current studio, the third he’s set up in a year, is a 50,000-square-foot building in an industrial park in Charleston, South Carolina. 
His younger brother Scott Winkelmann quit his job at Boeing two years ago, where he was a manager of the design engineering team, to run the Beeple operation. The team now consists of 16 full-time employees, including several aerospace engineers from Boeing.

“These guys left because they wanted to do something different,” Scott Winkelmann said. There are also digital artists, software engineers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers. 

Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.

Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house.

The record-smashing NFT sale comes after months of increasingly valuable auctions. In October, Winkelmann sold his first series of NFTs, with a pair going for $66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series of works for $3.5 million total. And last month, one of the NFTs that originally sold for $66,666.66 was resold for $6.6 million.

Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.

And yet in December, the first extensive auction of his art grossed $3.5 million in a single weekend. 

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