Elon Musk's Government Role: A Comedic Nod to the Dogecoin Phenomenon | Vanity Fair

Elon Musk’s appointment in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration is even goofier than you might have thought.

On Tuesday, Trump announced via a creatively capitalized social media post that tech big guy Musk (“Great,” Trump wrote, proper noun and all) and Vivek Ramaswamy (“American Patriot,” Trump said) would co-chair the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, a temporary working group that will, 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 use of its acronym: DOGE.

Yes, that's right: the country’s president-elect put two of his boosters into made-up positions in government with a joke name that’s a nod to a joke cryptocurrency, the value of which has skyrocketed since Trump’s election because ha-ha, hey, wouldn’t it be so funny to buy it? Oops, there goes the economy!

Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was introduced in December 2013, was explicitly described by its creators, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a joke, poking fun at the Bitcoin phenomenon and adopting the Shiba Inu breed associated with the doge meme as a mascot to grace the play money. That meme’s origin story is equally as inane, inspired by a joke misspelling of “dog” in a 2005 Homestar Runner video. The stuff empires are made of.

The dynamic duo of Ramaswamy and Musk are running with this whole thing. They’ve been given a deadline of July 4, 2026, to “make the government smaller,” and have kicked things off by sharing custom cartoon art of their agency name and photoshops of themselves looking…tough? Looking something. Musk even tweeted that he would be posting and updating a leaderboard for the “most insanely dumb use of your tax dollars.” This self-assigned task, a self-aggrandizing flex that will purposely remove the broader context of the government projects it axes to make them sound worthless, is something that Musk will presumably do during his work hours while collecting a salary furnished by American taxpayers.

Dogecoin co-founder Palmer wrote in a series of now-deleted tweets in 2021, long after parting ways with his joke-gone-wild, that he believed the crypto industry exists to “extract new money from the financially desperate and naive.”

'After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity,' he said.

Meanwhile, the currency’s other co-founder, Markus, has done a heel-turn from the early “10 commandments” he shared as 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 currency’s value was trending, regardless of whether it was up, down, or sideways, should be, “to the moon!” delivered with gusto.

Back in March, he tweeted about how a surge in Dogecoin’s valuation was “a really good indicator for how retarded people are getting,” and in recent days has been on a shitposting bender, suggesting that Musk should buy MSNBC, screenshotting charts tracking Doge’s growth as “morning wood,” and gleefully celebrating Musk’s government appointment by suggesting that people who object to cutting government spending are either “stupid” or “a grifter.”

Naturally, Dogecoin is currently booming, as are other cryptocurrencies, the meme money seeing a 48 percent increase in value overnight this week. Woof.

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