Dogecoin: The Joke That Hit $88 Billion

On the night of 8 May 2021, Elon Musk stood on the stage of Saturday Night Live and played a finance expert called Lloyd Ho. Asked by the comedian Michael Che what Dogecoin was, he explained it at length. Che asked if it was a hustle. "Yeah, it's a hustle," Musk said, to laughter. While the show was on air, Dogecoin fell as much as 29.5%, NBC reported, and the Robinhood trading app briefly buckled under the selling.

A day or two earlier the coin had touched about 73 cents, giving it a stock-market-style value of roughly $88 billion. It had started life seven and a half years before as a joke between two software engineers who never expected anyone to buy it.

Two engineers and a dog

Billy Markus, a programmer at IBM in Portland, and Jackson Palmer, who worked at Adobe in Sydney, launched Dogecoin on 6 December 2013. Palmer had joked on Twitter about investing in "Dogecoin"; Markus wrote the software. The face on the coin was Kabosu, a Shiba Inu photographed by her owner, the Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, whose sideways glance had become the "Doge" internet meme. Kabosu died in May 2024.

The code was copied from Luckycoin, itself a copy of Litecoin, which was a copy of Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, Dogecoin is "mined": computers compete to process the network's transactions and the winner is paid in new coins. That is how the supply grows, rather like a company issuing new shares to whoever keeps its books.

The joke caught on fast. Dogecoin's own history says it had more daily transactions than Bitcoin within about two weeks. On Reddit it became the currency of tips, small sums sent to thank someone for a good post. When thieves hacked the Dogewallet service on Christmas Day 2013 and took millions of coins, the community ran a "SaveDogemas" drive to cover the losses.

In 2014 the crowd went further. It raised 26.5 million DOGE, about $30,000, to send the Jamaican bobsleigh team to the Sochi Winter Olympics. It raised around $55,000 to put a Dogecoin car in a NASCAR race at Talladega for driver Josh Wise, who finished 20th. It paid for water wells in Kenya.

The money nobody planned for

Two early decisions shaped everything that followed. In February 2014 Palmer announced that Dogecoin would not have a hard cap on its supply, the opposite of Bitcoin's famous 21 million limit. From mid-2015, once the 100 billionth coin was mined, the network began adding a flat 10,000 DOGE per block, about 5 billion new coins a year, forever. In share terms it is a company that issues new stock every minute. The fixed amount means the percentage shrinks over time, but the coin can never become scarce.

The founders did not stay to see it pay off. Palmer left the community in 2015. Markus wrote in 2021 that he sold all his Dogecoin in 2015 after being laid off and worrying about money, and that it brought in about enough to buy a used Honda Civic. He later told Benzinga the money actually went on rent.

For years Dogecoin was worth a fraction of a cent. It peaked at about 1.7 cents in January 2018 with a market value near $2 billion, then sank again.

Enter Musk

Musk had joked about Dogecoin for years, but the real run started with a tweet on 20 December 2020: "One word: Doge." The price rose 20%. In 2021 he called himself the "Dogefather" and posted Doge memes on a regular basis; the rapper Snoop Dogg and the Kiss bassist Gene Simmons joined in. Mark Cuban's Dallas Mavericks basketball team began taking it for tickets and merchandise. On 14 April 2021, the day Coinbase listed its own shares on the Nasdaq, Dogecoin passed 10 cents for the first time. Two days later it was at 45 cents.

By early May the market value was above $85 billion, more than many household-name companies, for a coin with no company, no revenue and a supply that grows without end. Data providers put the peak anywhere from about $88 billion to just over $90 billion, depending on the hour measured. Then came Saturday Night Live, and the slide.

Musk did not let go. SpaceX announced a moon mission to be paid for in Dogecoin. In December 2021 Tesla started accepting it for merchandise and the price jumped 20%. In April 2023, months after he bought Twitter, he replaced its blue bird logo with the Doge dog for a few days.

In June 2022 an investor named Keith Johnson sued Musk and Tesla for $258 billion, accusing them of running a pyramid scheme by pumping Dogecoin. On 29 August 2024 US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan threw the case out for good, calling Musk's tweets "aspirational and puffery". Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro called it "a very good day for dogecoin".

The DOGE in Washington

In November 2024 Donald Trump, newly re-elected, said Musk and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy would lead a "Department of Government Efficiency", shortened to DOGE. It was not a real cabinet department but an initiative set up by executive order in January 2025. The coin had no link to it, but traders bought the name anyway: DOGE the coin hit about 47 cents in late November 2024 and finished the year up roughly 250%.

Musk left the government in May 2025. In November 2025 Reuters reported that Scott Kupor, head of the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's personnel office, had said DOGE "doesn't exist" as a central unit, eight months before its charter ran out. Kupor said his words had been spliced and that DOGE's principles lived on, and the White House called the report false, but the central team was gone.

Wall Street arrived in the same year. On 18 September 2025 the REX-Osprey DOGE ETF began trading, the first US exchange-traded fund tied to the coin, an ETF being a fund that trades on a stock exchange like a share. Grayscale followed in November with a fund that holds the coins directly. House of Doge, the business arm of the Dogecoin Foundation, teamed up with the listed company CleanCore Solutions to raise $175 million to buy DOGE for a corporate treasury, with Spiro as chairman.

None of it brought the 2021 prices back. The crypto crash of October 2025 hit memecoins hard, and in mid-October 2026 Dogecoin traded at about 8.2 cents, CoinGecko data showed, about 89% below its peak and worth roughly $12.9 billion. It was still the twelfth-largest crypto asset.

Palmer, the co-founder who left, has been the coin's most scathing critic. In July 2021 he wrote that he would not return, describing crypto as "an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents". The joke outlasted both of its authors, and turned out to be worth more to other people than it ever was to them.