Time to Get the Hell Out Of Doge
Musk, Memecoins and a $258 billion lawsuit
--
What’s the main benefit of spending $44 billion on a past-its-prime social media network?
Pumping the price of the shitcoins.
Elon Musk has had a strange relationship with Dogecoin. The coin started as a joke based on an internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog and was the crypto industry’s first “meme coin.” More fittingly, it is now referred to as a shitcoin, a term that encapsulates the useless cryptocurrencies in the market. Yet, despite its uselessness, Musk became one of its cheerleaders, reveling in the meme culture surrounding the coin. He regularly tweeted these memes or bold statements like “SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon.” Musk even made certain products Dogecoin eligible on the Tesla website (though he never followed through on the promise of allowing Dogecoin as a payment for an actual Tesla).
Every time he posted or announced anything Doge-related, the price would spike. Often it would rocket, sometimes with gains of over 1,000% in only a couple of days. Before appearing on SNL, he proclaimed himself “The Dogefather”, and the coin reached an $85 billion market cap. It registered a staggering $45 billion in transaction volume in 24 hours. It’s important to note that he’s also had the opposite effect on the market. During the SNL show, he agreed that Dogecoin was “a hustle.” The price plunged over 30% in the aftermath.
Thank you for reading Trend Mill. Subscribe for sassy takes on Big Tech, NFTs, the Metaverse and more.
It’s almost like what we’ve been witnessing was Musk indulging in blatant marketing manipulation, using his massive social media presence and pedestal as the world’s richest man to inflate the price of the coin.
Doge out of this one
Eventually — finally — people took notice. The repercussions arrived at his door last June in the form of a $258 billion lawsuit. It claims he peddled a pyramid scheme (Dogecoin), accuses him of wire fraud and gambling, and argues that he drove the price up more than 36,000% over two years before letting it crash “while knowing all along that the currency lacked intrinsic value and that its value depended solely on…
