Elon Muskthe appointment at Donald TrumpThe next administration is even wackier than you might have thought.
Tuesday, Trump announced via a creatively capitalized social media post that tech big guy Musk (“Awesome,” Trump wrote, proper name and all) and Vivek Ramaswamy (“American Patriot,” Trump said) would co-chair the new Department of Government Effectiveness, a temporary task force that would, in Trump’s words, “save America.” And because all the best jokes need to be identified and explained, the announcement of the committee’s name was followed by the use of its acronym: DOGE.
Yes, that’s right: the country’s president-elect put two of its defenders in invented positions within the government with a joke name that’s a nod to a joke cryptocurrency, whose value has skyrocketed since Trump’s election because ha-ha, hey, wouldn’t it so funny buy it? Oops, here comes the economy!
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency introduced in December 2013, has been explicitly described by its creators, Billy Markus And Jackson Palmeras a joke, mocking the Bitcoin phenomenon and adopting the Shiba Inu breed associated with the doge meme as a mascot to honor play money. The origin story of this meme is just as stupid, inspired by a misspelled “dog” joke in a 2005 Homestar Runner video. What Empires Are Made Of.
The dynamic duo of Ramaswamy and Musk are at the helm of it all. They were given until July 4, 2026 to “reduce the size of government” and kicked off in custom cartoon art sharing the name of their agency and photoshops of themselves looking… tough? I’m looking for something. Musk even tweeted that he would publish and update a ranking for “the most incredibly stupid use of your taxes.” This task he has set for himself, a self-aggrandizing maneuver that will deliberately remove the broader context of the government projects he is focusing on to make them seem worthless, is something Musk will likely accomplish on his working hours while earning a salary provided by American taxpayers.
Dogecoin co-founder Palmer wrote in a series of tweets now deleted in 2021long after parting ways with his joke gone wild, that he believed the crypto industry exists to “extract new money from financially desperate and naive people.”
“After years of study, I believe that cryptocurrency is a hypercapitalist, right-wing technology, built primarily to amplify the wealth of its supporters through a combination of tax avoidance, reduced regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity ” he said. .
Meanwhile, the currency’s other co-founder, Markus, has made an about-face the first “10 commandments” he shared like his “vision for Dogecoin,” in which he put the word “invest” in scare quotes, called crypto trading “very similar to gambling,” warned users to “be careful of greed,” and advised that all answers regarding the direction the value of the currency was trending, whether up, down or sideways, it should be “to the moon!” » delivered brilliantly.
Last March, he tweeted about how an increase in Dogecoin’s valuation was “a very good indicator of how backward people are”, and in recent days it has been on the verge of doing shit, suggesting Musk should buy MSNBCscreenshot of chart tracking The growth of the Doge as “morning wood” and happily celebrating Musk’s appointment to government by suggesting that people who oppose cutting public spending are either “stupid” or “crooks”.
Naturally, Dogecoin is currently booming, just like other cryptocurrencies, meme money see a 48 percent increase in value overnight this week. Frame.