Twitter owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears to have inspired multiple meme coins to run as he continues to tour the United States with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This includes a micro-cap Solana token launched via Pump.fun spiking by 10,000%, as well as other Musk-inspired tokens posting double-digit gains.
Musk has joined Trump on stage multiple times over the past month, as the world's richest man has been touted to run the potential future Department of Governmental Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) if the former president gets a second term.
With an acronym that is identical to Dogecoin’s ticker, the original meme coin has climbed nearly 20% over the past seven days and 33% over the month, with DOGE hitting a five-month high price of nearly $0.17. But it doesn’t stop there.
In fact, Elon Musk-inspired tokens are the fourth best performing crypto asset class over the past 24 hours, as categorized by CoinGecko.
Dogelon Mars (ELON) is up nearly 7% on the day, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has jumped 17%, while the Twitter AI-inspired Grok (GROK) has climbed over 7%.
On Monday, Musk followed the Twitter account of Solana meme coin Toad (TOAD) while it sat at a market cap of just $56,000. As a result, the Pump.fun token spiked an astounding 10,000% to nearly $6 million, but fell in minutes to a still impressive increased market cap of $585,000.
Since then, the token has traded mostly sideways, dipping further to a market cap of $438,000. Still, Musk follows the account and he even liked a post from it.
🆕 @elonmusk has started following @toadpump pic.twitter.com/4gDpcvtDIq
— Big Tech Alert (@BigTechAlert) October 28, 2024
The tech billionaire has a long history with Dogecoin, which peaked when Musk teased a mention of the coin on "Saturday Night Live" in 2021—DOGE hit its all-time high of $0.73 in the lead-up to this event, though ultimately plunged even when he did mention it on the long-running late night show.
Since then, the meme coin market has evolved and matured. While still highly speculative with no underlying value to the asset class, millions of meme coins have flooded the market.
Over the past 24 hours, some of the largest meme coins by market cap have also performed well despite no connection to Musk. Just five of the top 50 meme coins by market cap are in the red today, with Trump-themed coin MAGA down the worst at 6%.
As for the winners, Maga Hat (MAGA) has soared 19% and maximalist meme coin HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu (BITCOIN) has leaped 14%. Some of the largest meme coins have climbed too, with Ethereum’s Mog Coin (MOG) up 15%, Popcat (POPCAT) rising 14%, and Shiba Inu (SHIB) climbing 9%.
Edited by Stacy Elliott