Elon Musk and Dogecoin: How the Billionaire Became the ‘Dogefather’
As Dogecoin makes a comeback off the back of Bitcoin’s surge, some may be pondering:
Where did the asset come from? What’s it for? And what’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk got to do with it?
The original meme coin’s boom largely has the world’s richest man to thank. Musk’s obsession with shitposting helped boost the coin to a top 10 cryptocurrency.
It’s been a wacky ride over the past few years, culminating in Musk’s appointment to co-lead a government agency called D.O.G.E.—yes, really. But we’ll explain it all.
2018: What the DOGE?
Dogecoin is the biggest and oldest meme coin and the second-biggest proof-of-work cryptocurrency. It was created in 2013 as a joke by developers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer.
The idea was to poke fun at the huge number of altcoins and crypto projects entering the market following Bitcoin’s rapid ascent, and the coin enjoyed relative obscurity and a low price during its early years.
But then along came Musk. The eccentric billionaire asked Palmer in a 2018 tweet to help with the Twitter bot problem. Scammers had created a number of fake high-profile accounts, including Musk’s, in order to push crypto cons.
The scams typically posted fake Ethereum giveaways.
It was the first real interest Musk had shown in Dogecoin.
2019: The pump begins
Musk started to pump Dogecoin the next year. “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency,” he wrote in April 2019, in response to a screenshot of a poll from the official Dogecoin account asking who should be the cryptocurrency’s CEO. “It’s pretty cool.”
The post would be the first of many to cause the asset’s value to rocket upwards. Soon after Musk’s first tweet about Dogecoin, the market cap of the coin hit $400 million and crypto exchange Huobi listed it.
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