So Saturday night I did something I don't normally do, which is turn on live network TV on purpose. Elon Musk hosted SNL, and I mostly wanted to see how bad it would be. It was pretty bad! But the part everybody's still talking about two days later isn't even a joke that landed, it's what happened to Dogecoin while the show was airing.
Quick recap for anyone who spent the weekend outside: there was a sketch called "The Dogefather," Musk playing off the whole meme-coin thing he's been tweeting about for months. And then during the Weekend Update segment, Michael Che asked him straight up to explain Dogecoin to the audience, and Musk just kind of laughed and called it "a hustle." His word, not mine. The coin was sitting near its all-time high going into the broadcast, and by the time the credits rolled it had lost something like a third of its value. Live, in real time, while the guy who's been hyping it for a year said the quiet part out loud on national television.
I don't own any Dogecoin, for what it's worth. Never bought in. But my buddy Rob does, and I got a text from him around 11:40pm that just said "he's tanking his own coin lol" and then nothing else for like twenty minutes. I checked back later and the price had clawed back a little, but not much. There's something almost funny about an asset whose entire value proposition is "a rich guy on Twitter likes it" getting demolished by that same rich guy making a joke on TV. That's not a flaw in the system exactly, it just is the system.
What I keep coming back to is how weirdly honest the whole thing was. He wasn't wrong! Dogecoin started as a literal joke in 2013, a Shiba Inu meme slapped onto a Bitcoin fork, and it still doesn't really do anything that a dozen other coins don't already do better. Calling it a hustle is just describing the thing accurately. The problem is a few hundred thousand people apparently needed to hear that from him specifically before the price reacted, which tells you everything about how this particular market works and none of it is reassuring if you're the type of person who put in rent money hoping for another 10x.
Anyway. I'm not trying to make this a finance blog, I don't know enough to give anyone advice and wouldn't if I did. What got me was the theater of it, watching a live audience laugh at a joke that was simultaneously costing real people real money in real time, probably including some people in that studio audience. That's a pretty specific flavor of 2021 that I don't think existed five years ago in quite the same way.
Small tangent, unrelated except that it was also this weekend: my gas station on Route 9 had a line out to the road on Sunday afternoon, first time I've seen that since maybe a hurricane scare years back. Apparently a pipeline outage down south has people up here topping off tanks that were already three-quarters full, which is its own little case study in how fast a rumor turns into a self-fulfilling problem. I didn't wait in it. Had half a tank and figured I could survive on principle alone.
Back to the coin thing for a second, because I think it's worth saying plainly: I don't think meme currencies are a scam exactly, but I do think treating one like a retirement plan is a bad idea, and Saturday night was as clear a demonstration of why as you're going to get. If the value of your investment can drop 30% because a guy told a joke about it on a sketch comedy show, that's not really an investment in the sense most people mean when they use that word. It's closer to betting on which way a coin flip lands, except the coin has a cartoon dog on it and Twitter decides when to flip it.
Rob texted me again this morning, by the way. Just a shrug emoji. Draw your own conclusions.