Meme coins have over the past few years solidified their position as an alternative investment asset in the modern-day financial market ecosystem. According to a report by Coingecko, this crypto sector ranked as the second best performing narrative of 2024, with an average return of 2185%, while the AI narrative carried the day with an average return of 2940%. What’s particularly intriguing about these metrics is that meme coins outperformed other crypto sectors, including DePIN, Layer 1, Gamefi, NFTs, and DeFi, which are considered to be more fundamentally attractive.
So, what’s the meme coin hype all about? At the very core, meme coins form part of the identity of internet culture. If you regularly use social media, you’ve probably interacted with a joke or some form of humor that has gone viral; a handful of these jokes/memes have evolved into digital assets with little to no intrinsic value other than the fact that they are an internet sensation.
What makes this space even more interesting is the influence by key figures, particularly Tesla’s founder Elon Musk, whose tweets and public statements have continuously shaped the dynamics of the meme coin market.
The Elon Musk Meme Coin Effect
The first meme coin, Dogecoin ($DOGE), was launched in 2013, but it wasn’t until December 2020 when Elon Musk tweeted out “One Word: Doge” that it started gaining interest beyond crypto circles. Since then, the Tesla founder has mentioned DOGE several times, most of which have led to significant jumps in price.
For instance, at the height of the bull market in 2021, Elon tweeted that “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”; this led to a 40% gain in the cryptocurrency’s value. In another instance, he tweeted a meme of “doge barking at the moon”, causing over a 100% surge in the price of DOGE at the time. More recently, Elon’s appointment to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) also triggered a spike in the price.
If you’ve not been around the crypto block for some time, you might think DOGE is the only meme coin that has performed well thanks to Elon’s nod; that’s not the case. In fact, there’s a whole category of Elon inspired meme coins which enjoys a total market cap of $51.7 billion as of writing. Most of these meme coins have either been inspired by Elon or received indirect mentions/references from the billionaire that caused their value to increase.
A good example of such a meme coin is LADYS; touted as the fully memetically optimized white pill, this meme coin was subtly hinted at when Elon tweeted out a picture from the Milady NFT collection. Although LADYS is not in any way affiliated with Milady’s, the tweet alone was enough momentum to propel the LADYS meme coin to a market cap of almost 300 million at some point; the price is currently over 8,800% higher from its all-time low, which also happens to be the same day when Elon made the tweet.
More recently, another meme coin dubbed Kekius Maximus also received a ‘nod’ from Elon when he changed his X (formerly Twitter) name to ‘Kekius Maximus’. The meme coin’s price increased by over 4800%, with the market cap jumping from a mere $20 million to $380 million within the same day. One trader who bought in early with only $66 flipped this meager investment into a whopping $3 million.
The examples in this section are just the tip of the iceberg of how much Elon has been moving the meme coin space; there are quite a number of traders that have notifications and trading bots to react to Elon’s ‘jokes’ or subtle hints about any meme coins that could be tied to his tweets or utterances, whether in or out of context.
This situation where a huge number of retail investors sort of rely on Elon’s ‘signals’ is the main reason why “affiliated” meme coins have often ended up with more capital chasing them compared to the rest. More importantly, the growing interest in this asset class and embracement by prominent figures is proving to be a strong force in shaping the internet culture beyond memes and jokes to financial assets that will be part of tomorrow’s digital investing norms.
“No one understands how significant it becomes in the cultural zeitgeist. So many large investors view it as, ‘this is stupid and all these retail investors are going to lose all their money,’ but I think it has the ability to inform culture,” noted NYU undergraduate and meme coin investor, Aulden Borthwick, in a conversation with the New York Post.
What Does the Future Hold for Meme Coins?
As mentioned in the introduction, the meme coin space is currently among the most thriving sectors within the larger crypto ecosystem. The year 2025 will likely see more Elon ‘nod seeking’ meme coins spring up given the ease of launching with blockchains like Solana introducing Pump.fun, while Hyperliquid, a more nascent blockchain ecosystem, has also featured a seamless tool for launching dubbed Hypurr Fun.
That being the case, Elon Musk will likely continue to influence the meme coin ecosystem significantly. This is because of the social media power he currently wields, not to mention the fact that he seems to enjoy toying with memes to the point of recently including DOGE as a means of payment at Tesla. As to whether it will be the first form of currency when civilization gets to Mars, only the future can tell.