Megan Hayes | News Editor
This past Monday, April 3rd, users of the social media platform Twitter opened up the app to see that the platform's uber-recognizable logo, a small blue bird, had been replaced. What showed in its place was a Shiba Inu dog, called “Doge”, a meme that became popular in 2013.
The Doge meme, which features a Shiba Inu named “Kabosu”, with its paws crossed and colorful text on the screen to represent the dog’s inner monologue. The text on the screen, written in comic sans, has simple phrases of improper English like “Wow. Concern. So scare.” This meme took off and was adopted by many to make their own variations of it to cater to certain jokes, and sparked the creation of “Dogecoin”, a cryptocurrency platform designed in late 2013. Dogecoin, which was designed satirically to poke fun at bigger cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, was created by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer and has gained a large following of celebrities and users of social media alike, namely Elon Musk.
A few years later, on May 9th of 2021, creator of Spacex and CEO of Tesla and Twitter, Elon Musk, ran a rideshare mission through Spacex to the moon that was completely funded by the profits of Dogecoin. This brought the cryptocurrency into the spotlight and established a solid connection between Musk and the creators. Musk is known for having a fondness for Dogecoin, but this past Monday after a conversation with a Twitter user who asked as a joke for Elon to make Dogecoin the CEO, Musk promptly changed the Twitter logo to the shiba inu Doge.
In response, “Musk is currently facing a $258 billion lawsuit filed by investors who are accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support Dogecoin (Reuters)...The investors claim that Musk intentionally drove up Dogecoin's price by over 36,000% in two years and then allowed it to crash. (LiveMint News)” This squabble over Musk, Dogecoin, and the lawsuit has brought a large amount of attention to Dogecoin, bumping up its market value by an estimated $4 billion dollars. Dogecoin, which has experienced many crashed due to Musk and other factors, is now soaring and investments in the program are quickly piling up. The Twitter logo has now been changed back to the bird, as a way for Elon to avoid the lawsuit, which his legal team is calling a "fanciful work of fiction".