Here’s an investment strategy one doesn’t hear every day:
Step 1. Buy big into a form of cryptocurrency that was literally formed as a joke, and then wait patiently for the world’s second-richest (at present) man to become a major cryptocurrency booster and get booked on Saturday Night Live.
Step 2. Invest more heavily in Dogecoin.
Step 3. During that appearance, watch for said host to pass a secret message to investors about this so-called joke cryptocurrency during a sketch.
Step 4. Profit.
Now, if you went to see your financial advisor and they suggested this as a replacement for your 401K, odds are good you would immediately fire that person and find someone less insane to manage your money. But if you are one of the millions of Dogecoin enthusiasts around the world, nothing about that plan sounds insane, as you are currently right in the middle of it: You’ve bought the Dogecoin, you doubled down when you heard Elon Musk was hosting Saturday Night Live this week (after doubling down after reading his earlier tweets about it), and now the only thing left to do is to wait for the secret message, and for the profits to roll in.
And if you find yourself thinking “this is why cryptocurrency is insane,” let us remind you that so far, this investment strategy is working out. Within days of the announcement that Elon Musk was hosting SNL, Dogecoin prices started to spike, hitting an all-time high of 50 cents a coin within days of the announcement. Doge hasn’t hit a dollar as of yet — 24 hours before Elon’s big appearance on SNL, the price currently sits at around $.63 cents a whack, meaning its price has soared over 10 thousand percent in the last five months.
That impressive figure is only slightly dented by the fact that Dogecoin started the year worth around 0.005405 cents at the start of 2021. To put that in more practical terms, if anyone loved you enough to give you $1,000 worth of Dogecoin for Christmas, as of today, you’d have north of $100,000 worth (according to MarketWatch’s calculations). And if the big Elon bounce actually come to pass this weekend, a Dogecoiner who started with a $1,000 worth of the coin would have a fortune pushing a quarter of a million dollars.
Not bad at all for a cryptocurrency that started as a joke — which is quite literally what its creator intended. In 2013, Dogecoin was started as a blockchain currency with a dog for a mascot, designed to poke fun at some of the sillier speculations on display in the early days of crypto. Unlike bitcoin, it doesn’t have a built-in cap, so it was not designed to be an inflation hedge — in fact, it was designed to be something of a parody of bitcoin.
But what might be described as the greatest illustration of Poe’s law in history, it seems that Dogecoin is laughing itself all the way to the bank, on crypto enthusiasm built by Elon Musk’s SNL appearance this week. (Poe’s law states that it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.) Dogecoin parodied the bitcoin mania of early days so hard that it has actually become part of the cryptocurrency mania that it was once trying to mock.
Now, it isn’t exactly fair to Elon, who seems to have been trying to wean people off of the rather exuberant levels of enthusiasm that are building up in advance of his SNL appearance. He is noting that if people “want to speculate and have some fun — there’s a good chance that crypto is the future currency of Earth.”
A good chance, but not so good that he is advising anyone to bet the farm on it. Crypto could be the future, he noted, but which one? That’s another issue entirely. Maybe there will be multiple, or maybe one will come out on top.
“People should not invest their life savings in cryptocurrency, to be clear,” Musk told TMZ. “That’s unwise.”
From Elon’s lips to the Dogecoin fanboys’ ears this weekend, as Musk takes the stage in Rockefeller Center for the first time. But Dogecoin’s price was up 1.5 percent as this story was being written, and Musk’s messaging on this subject has been mixed at best. Last week, Musk dubbed himself the “Dogefather” in a brief tweet promoting his SNL appearance. The coin shot up more than 30 percent overnight.
The Dogefather
SNL May 8— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2021
“Musk will undoubtedly have a sketch on cryptocurrencies that will probably go viral for days and further motivate his army of followers to try to send Dogecoin to the moon,” wrote Ed Moya, a senior market analyst with online trading firm OANDA.
What will it do if it gets there, and how long can the magic of Musk keep it there? That remains to be seen. There’s little left to do, it seems, except to pop the popcorn, settle in and see if his comedic stylings can do more than make us laugh, and perhaps actually move markets.
If he can — and if a joke crypto can become a kingmaker over the weekend — we can’t help but think that it might be the best punchline to come out of Saturday Night Live in several decades.
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