Elon Musk’s appointment in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration is even goofier than you may need thought.
On Tuesday, Trump announced by way of a creatively capitalized social media put up that tech huge man Musk (“Nice,” Trump wrote, correct noun and all) and Vivek Ramaswamy (“American Patriot,” Trump mentioned) would co-chair the newly created Division of Authorities Effectivity, a brief working group that may, in Trump’s phrases, “Save America.” And since all the very best jokes must be recognized and defined, the announcement of the committee’s identify was adopted by use of its acronym: DOGE.
Sure, that is proper: the nation’s president-elect put two of his boosters into made-up positions in authorities with a joke identify that’s a nod to a joke cryptocurrency, the worth of which has skyrocketed since Trump’s election as a result of ha-ha, hey, wouldn’t it’s so humorous to purchase it? Oops, there goes the economic system!
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was launched in December 2013, was explicitly described by its creators, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a joke, poking enjoyable on the Bitcoin phenomenon and adopting the Shiba Inu breed related to the doge meme as a mascot to grace the play cash. That meme’s origin story is equally as inane, impressed by a joke misspelling of “canine” in a 2005 Homestar Runner video. The stuff empires are made from.
The dynamic duo of Ramaswamy and Musk are working with this complete factor. They’ve been given a deadline of July 4, 2026, to “make the federal government smaller,” and have kicked issues off by sharing custom cartoon art of their company identify and photoshops of themselves looking…tough? Trying one thing. Musk even tweeted that he could be posting and updating a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb use of your tax {dollars}.” This self-assigned process, a self-aggrandizing flex that may purposely take away the broader context of the federal government tasks it axes to make them sound nugatory, is one thing that Musk will presumably do throughout his work hours whereas accumulating a wage furnished by American taxpayers.
Dogecoin co-founder Palmer wrote in a series of now-deleted tweets in 2021, lengthy after parting methods together with his joke-gone-wild, that he believed the crypto trade exists to “extract new cash from the financially determined and naive.”
“After years of learning it, I consider that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic expertise constructed primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents by means of a mixture of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced shortage,” he mentioned.
In the meantime, the foreign money’s different co-founder, Markus, has performed a heel-turn from the early “10 commandments” he shared as his “imaginative and prescient for Dogecoin,” during which he put the phrase “make investments” in scare-quotes, known as crypto buying and selling “similar to playing,” warned customers to “watch out of greed,” and suggested that each one solutions relating to the course the foreign money’s worth was trending, no matter whether or not it was up, down, or sideways, ought to be, “to the moon!” delivered with gusto.
Again in March, he tweeted about how a surge in Dogecoin’s valuation was “a extremely good indicator for a way retarded persons are getting,” and in current days has been on a shitposting bender, suggesting that Musk should buy MSNBC, screenshotting charts monitoring Doge’s growth as “morning wood,” and gleefully celebrating Musk’s authorities appointment by suggesting that individuals who object to chopping authorities spending are both “silly” or “a grifter.”
Naturally, Dogecoin is at present booming, as are different cryptocurrencies, the meme cash seeing a 48 percent increase in value in a single day this week. Woof.
