A “meme coin” is a kind of cryptocurrency that is based entirely around a meme, or has been made into a meme, as discussed in the article about rugpulls. DogeCoin is considered the oldest, based around the Doge meme – the original creator was actively making a joke about cryptocurrency at the time. If you read the Wikipedia article, it will tell you three times within the first page that this was always intended as a joke. BitCoin was fluctuating wildly thanks to the lack of oversight that defines it, and so Doge breaks into the scene at roughly .0003$ to a DogeCoin. Some time during 2017-2018, the coin jumps in value by a thousand, to 0.02$ (the entire cryptocurrency market was experiencing a bubble) and then in 2021, SpaceX (controlled by Elon Musk) gets into DogeCoin, causing the value to spike to an absolutely wild 0.45$, which – due to the number of coins in the market – made DogeCoin one of the most highly-valued cryptocurrencies in the world. A month later, it hit 0.20$, where it continued to sink until it hit 0.07$, in June of 2022. It has recovered a bit (and even had a bit of a rally in 2024) but now sits at 0.15$, a dramatic increase from its initial value but a far cry from its peak.
What is the point of cryptocurrency? It depends on who you ask. The high-minded idealists will tell you it was made because the government is so involved in commerce, and it can stop commerce it doesn’t like any time it wants, so people need a go-between. That’s fair – a lot of things have been historically illegal that were later made legal, things that arguably shouldn’t have been illegal at all.
The more hustle-focused, ‘grindset’ influencer lifestyle peddlers will call it an investment, a way to buy and sell value without having to actually do anything. DogeCoin, which was made in an attempt to satirize the only two possible descriptors of a fully made-up money item, ended up failing to straddle the line and landed in category two for most people.
Once the cat is let out of the bag, it’s very difficult to get the thing back in. Dogecoin, by virtue of being 1) relevant 2) based on a popular, still-active (at the time) meme and 3) part of a cool-looking but unknown technology, unknowingly set a trap for investors that wouldn’t go off for years. “Investors” in Dogecoin were part of a community that largely acknowledged the coin was worthless, but often fantasized about it blowing up in a ‘haha wouldn’t that be crazy?’ kind of way. When it actually started to blow up, as in the price increased by several times over from a thousandth of a cent into single digit numbers of cents, the people who were holding onto thousands of these formerly worthless coins suddenly had a real number looking back at them. Ten dollars of DogeCoin, approximately 33,000 DogeCoins when it was starting out, turned into roughly 600$. The stated goal of the community at the time was to get a single Dogecoin to be worth a whole dollar. Who wouldn’t try to jump on?
This understandably caused the price to keep increasing. It passed 0.20$, and then Elon Musk got involved in the project, hyping the coin up. Musk has a deep-seated need to be liked. This was less well-known in the 2010s, but very, very obvious now. He bought into this coin because he wants to be liked by cool people and doesn’t want to be left out, the same reason he reportedly, allegedly, paid someone to make him a Path of Exile account that was impressive (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/01/20/elon-musk-finally-admits-to-path-of-exile-2-account-boosting-in-dms/) and is constantly searching for a group of people who can stand him and love him. Unfortunately, he also cannot help but try to strip every good relationship for all of the money he can get out of it. He said Dogecoin rules! He’s going to use it to fund a rocket to the moon! He’ll let you buy merch with it! Once the coin had risen to a whopping 0.73$ (those 33,000 Dogecoin from before were now worth 24,000$!) he… bounced. According to Law and Crime, he played a character on SNL that called the coin a hustle, and the price dropped by half, where it continued to spike and sink unpredictably for the next several months but never got any closer to a dollar than it was before he made that appearance.
He was actually sued for this; he had to alter the way he tweeted for this. He tried to worm out of the consequences by saying his free speech would be impacted, and got denied.
Musk, who is objectively a billionaire business owner CEO and calls himself a genius, was puffing the numbers of this totally worthless form of currency up for the sake of the joke, and then when it tanked because he tried to make another joke, he tried to minimize the impact he had on the project, which – according to the timeline – was undeniable. At the time, he had to have a moderator look over his tweets to ensure he wasn’t going to do that again by accident. CEOs are not normally so close to the ground or making the same kind of “jokes” that regular people are. Most of them are aware it might look like ‘advice’ and the more specific your ‘advice’ is, the more possible it is to sue you. ‘Racketeering’ is normally not so clear cut. At the time, Musk smoking weed on the Joe Rogan show made him cool, a normal guy who was also Tony Stark, someone trustworthy who told it like it was, a ‘self made’ billionaire according to his own self-made origin story that could give you the advice to get rich too if you just acted like him. Now, all of this is a clear pattern of faking authenticity while trying to build ‘a fanbase’, something CEOs don’t normally need or want, but at the time it was misunderstood as breaking rank with other rich people to try and raise the tide for everyone else. The people investing at Doge when it was at 70 cents did not have a clue what he was doing; the people who’d held on to Doge were briefly rich and then not so much.
The coin hasn’t died. The people who bought as a joke right at the very start still recognize the thing for what it is, and despite his attempts to clear himself of his impact on the coin post-lawsuit, he still affects its price, and even went and named his new agency after the meme, which probably had a hand in the spike back in December 2024. DogeCoin isn’t what it once was. It won’t ever be again. But, hey – at least we all know Musk gives bad advice on crypto now.
