Let That Sink In: Dogefather Is Chief Twit
Let That Sink In: Dogefather Is Chief Twit
Hey everyone,
Elon formally took over Twitter last week, storming HQ with sink in hand.
Dogecoin has been absolutely ripping since the deal closed, cracking 10 cents and up over 100% on the month.
Let’s take a look at one of the wildest weeks in the history of memes, and why the fun is just beginning.
Chief Twit and the Army of Dogs
Elon finally owns Twitter.
He celebrated the deal's closing by changing his bio to Chief Twit and toting a sink into Twitter HQ.
The news coincided with an incredible run for Dogecoin, which hit a six-month high after a 100% weekly increase, briefly tagging 15 cents over the weekend.
Elon taking the helm at Twitter can only mean positive things for Dogecoin.
The idea to integrate Twitter and Doge has been floating around since the DogeArmy stormed onto the scene during the meme stock saga at the end of January 2021.
It got a boost in March of this year, when the DogeArmy account Wall Streets Bets Chairman proposed buying Twitter and changing the logo to a Doge.
While the idea may sound fanciful, it is firmly grounded in historical reality.
Elon's past with digital finance runs deep. One of his earliest ventures was X.com, an online bank which later became PayPal.
PayPal made peer-to-peer online payments possible, but fell short of its ultimate goal of disrupting legacy banking by creating its own digital currency.
The world may have not been ready for digital cash twenty years ago, but it is now. Dogecoin is the missing piece to complete the X.com/PayPal vision.
In August, Elon hinted that Dogecoin and Twitter could form the basis for a revival of X.
Last week, I wrote a thread about how Twitter and Dogecoin could merge into TwitterX and fulfill Elon's original vision.
The implications of a truly digital financial system are staggering. Take a look!
The big idea is for Twitter to transform into an "everything app" that integrates the social, commercial, and informational aspects of the Internet under one roof.
It's not hard to imagine Twitter turning into a digital bank that plugs in to Amazon, Uber, Shopify, Spotify, Ebay, Etsy, and so on.
At the same time, it could become a social nexus where folks can repost content from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Soundcloud, Patreon, etc, with the added benefit that creators are able to receive crypto tips as a form of "likes."
Elon even ran a poll over the weekend about bringing back the video platform Vine (69% of three million respondents said yes)! On Monday, Axios reported his plan to reboot Vine by the end of the year.
Twitter is already the most important social network for journalism in the world. With its draconian censorship policies given the boot, a new era of grassroots-funded citizen journalism will be free to flourish.
Underpinning all of these ecosystems is a digital cash flow that operates outside the control of gatekeepers like banks, tech companies, or content moderators. Creators will be able to earn their keep online without fear of being shut down for saying the wrong thing.
More than any other point in history, there's a clear path for Dogecoin to usher in a golden age of the Internet by becoming its native form of money.
If anyone can pull it off, it's Elon: the man, the myth, the legend, Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars, Destroyer of Shorts, Master of Memes, Perfume Salesman, Dogefather, and now Chief Twit.
Let that sink in
When Elon celebrated the acquisition by lugging a sink into Twitter HQ, it was a sign that he was about to take Twitter's meme game to another level.
His history with the let that sink in meme goes back a ways and, perhaps, hints at things to come.
He first posted the meme May 2020 during an exchange with President Trump.
In response to a Trump tweet calling for the reopening of Tesla's California factory, then closed due to coronavirus, Elon tweeted "Thank You!"
Another user wrote, "You just agreed with Donald trump....Let that sink in, Elon."
Elon defended his right to find common ground with Trump, tweeting, "Those who always disagree have a closed mind … but, by their very nature, that won’t sink in (sigh)."
When different account posted a sink meme to accentuate his point, he posted his own sink meme.
The exchange's relation to Elon's sink gag at Twitter HQ might be written off as a random coincidence, if not for the fact that Trump's reinstatement promises to be one of the biggest and earliest spectacles of the revamped Twitter.
In May, during a conversation with the Financial Times, Elon said he would reverse Trump's permanent ban: "I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
Later in the conversation, he called the ban "morally wrong and flat out stupid" because it further polarized social media.
Thursday morning, Elon reiterated his concern about polarization in a letter to Twitter Advertisers, perhaps to preempt concerns about Trump's return.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that "about a dozen" companies were planning to suspend advertising if Trump were reinstated.
The sentiment is not universal, however. WSJ also reported some companies were in "wait-and-see mode." The deputy editor-in-chief of the German tabloid BILD, Europe's largest newspaper, said that kicking Trump off the platform was "wrong" and "the definition of arbitrariness and hypocrisy."
A lot has changed, on Twitter and IRL, since January 2021, when Trump was booted from all the social media giants.
Back then, Trump supporters were one of Twitter's largest and most vocal communities.
After the events of January 6th, 70,000 Trump-supporting accounts were purged in order to "protect the conversation on our service from attempts to incite violence, organize attacks, and share deliberately misleading information about the election outcome.”
The purge kicked off a radical escalation of censorship that led to the methodical removal of dozens of Twitter's largest conservative accounts over the next two years.
In the wake of the purge, pro-Trump sentiment on Twitter became vanishingly small, though it's difficult to tell if his followers all migrated elsewhere or were simply content-moderated out of existence.
Either way, the mass banning shaped the social media landscape indelibly, and in many ways led to where we are today.
Recent developments—Elon's Twitter purchase, Ye's Parler purchase, and Trump's creation of Truth Social—are best understood as a dialectical response to January 2021.
Earlier this month, Elon acknowledged the shift in social media's center of gravity by posting (and then deleting) a Three Musketeers meme with himself, Ye, and Trump.
For folks who celebrated Elon's imminent takeover in April of this year, the last six months have dragged on interminably.
However, since he took control of the platform last week, events have picked up pace.
On Thursday, within hours of the deal's official close, Elon fired censorship czar Vijaya Gadde, the person responsible for Trump's ban, along with CEO Parag Agrawal. The firings were classified as "for cause," meaning Twitter will not pay the employees over $100 million in severance packages.
Friday morning, Elon said he was personally looking at censorship, while Bloomberg reported that Tesla engineers were working with Twitter staff to review code.
Later in the day, he tweeted that no accounts would be reinstated until a content moderation council convened.
While the Twitterverse waits with bated breath, there are already signs the information war is ramping up on several fronts.
Twitter's fact checking appears to have an undergone a makeover: multiple Biden tweets about the Inflation Reduction Act were flagged as needing additional context.
On Sunday, Elon said he would "look into" Twitter's censorship of an article about a whistleblower alleging a Florida ballot harvesting scheme. The next day, a warning label was removed from the article.
In another exchange, Hilary Clinton accused the GOP of spreading "hate and deranged conspiracy theories" about Paul Pelosi. Elon wrote back, "there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," and linked to an article claiming Paul Pelosi got into a drunk fight with a male prostitute.
When The New York Times put out an article accusing him of advancing "baseless accusations" about the Pelosi family, Elon roasted the Times for publishing fake stories.
Finally, in response to a LeBron James tweet that an alleged surge in hate speech on Twitter "is scary AF," Elon posted a thread by Twitter employee Yoel Roth, who explained that most of the tweets were inauthentic because "50,000 Tweets repeatedly using a particular slur came from just 300 accounts."
The Ligma Variant
Amidst all this seriousness, there was time for yet more memetic hi-jinx.
In a seminal moment in meme history, on Friday two guys carrying cardboard boxes outside Twitter HQ told reporters they were software engineers who'd just been fired.
The guys gave their names as Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson (read those last names again).
CNBC and Bloomberg, eager to confirm the Big Bad Elon narrative, picked up the interviews, instantly winning the guys spots in the online troll hall-of-fame.
The episode is yet another crack in the facade of corporate media, which breathlessly ran the story without bothering to confirm the employees existed.
The fact that the gag went down at the very same moment free speech returned to the Internet is another perfect intersection of fate and irony. The mainstream narrative has been collapsing for a while, but Ligma Johnson put it out of its misery for good.
In time, The Legend of Ligma Johnson will be told far and wide as the day that meme culture delivered its death blow to the regime of information control, and free speech reigned once more.
Free bird
After an epic year-long battle, Elon owns Twitter.
In his hands, the platform has the potential to transform social media as we know it, combining its commercial, informational, and journalistic functions under one roof, with Dogecoin as its monetary base layer.
If the first few days are any indication, we're in for a wild, meme-filled ride. The Legend of Ligma Johnson will go down in Internet lore as the day control of the narrative shifted from legacy institutions back to the trolls, meme-makers, and citizen journalists.
While it's impossible to invest in Twitter now that the company is privately owned, Dogecoin is a leveraged bet that Elon will succeed with his plans for X.com. To take part in the revolution, stay calm, DCA, and stack dog money.
The bird is freed, and Dogecoin has begun a new chapter on its way to being the future currency of earth.
Let that sink in.
Dogey Treats: News Bites
Binance's CZ explained his rationale for investing in Elon's Twitter takeover on CNBC and said he hoped to facilitate Twitter's transition to Web3.
Babylon Bee's Seth Dillon did a victory lap for refusing to back down to Twitter's censors. BB had its account suspended for seven months over a joke which they refused to delete.
The Verge reported that Twitter plans to start charging $20 a month for blue check verification by November 7th. Elon tweeted, "The whole verification process is being revamped right now."
Elon tweeted that Twitter's board and law firm deliberately hid evidence of bot accounts from the court. In the tweet, he posted a screenshot of an internal conversation between Twitter's employees to support his claim, and hinted at legal action, writing "Stay tuned, more to come...."
Elon fired Twitter's board and became sole director.
SpaceX/Tesla
Starship's first flight is reportedly scheduled for early December.
Solar farms are the cheapest form of electricity, according to a report from 2020.
Artificial Intelligence
Former Director of AI at Tesla Andrej Karpathy appeared on Lex Fridman's podcast to talk about AI. Elon tweeted, "Andrej will always be welcome at Tesla."
Russia-Ukraine
In a formal discussion, Vladimir Putin said "The historical period of undivided dominance of the West in world affairs is coming to an end" and, "The unipolar world is becoming a thing of the past." Russia pulled out of a UN-brokered agreement that allowed Ukraine to export grain after it claimed Ukraine carried out a terrorist attack using drones on Russian ships in Crimea.
Russia and Ukraine each accused the other of planning to set off a dirty bomb to escalate the war.
Russia called for a UN Security Council probe into alleged US biolabs in Ukraine.
Free Speech
PayPal reinstated a $2,500 fine for misinformation.
The Intercept published an investigative report showing the DHS's plans to influence online discourse about Covid, the Afghanistan withdrawal, racial justice, Ukraine, and other controversial topics.
A study found the CDC ignored a statistically significant safety signal linking mRna vaccines to myocarditis among young males, waiting three months to alert the public. A report from the US Senate found that Covid "most likely" leaked from a lab. The Atlantic published an article by economist Emily Oster calling for a "Pandemic Amnesty" to "forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID."
Nets guard Kyrie Irving was criticized by team owner Joe Tsai for tweeting a link to a film called "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America" that claims European Jewish people owned slave ships. Tsai said, "I'm disappointed that Kyrie appears to support a film based on a book full of anti-semitic disinformation." Irving denied the accusation, writing, "The 'anti-semitic' label that is being pushed on me is not justified and does not reflect the reality or truth I live in every day." He addressed the topic in a post-game interview with reporters.
A clip surfaced of Charlamagne tha God saying that Jewish people control Hollywood and the music industry. Last week, Charlamagne called Ye a Nazi in response to recent interviews.
After experiencing one of the most sweeping cancellation campaigns ever (including being banned from Goodwill), Ye resumed posting on Instagram, calling for artists and athletes to make their contracts with agencies public. In a separate message to Ari Emmanuel, he wrote, "I still love you." Emmanuel, brother of politician Rahm Emmanuel, has called for all companies to cut ties with Ye. Ye apologized to the black community for questioning the circumstances surrounding George Floyd's death. Over the weekend, he was suspended again from Instagram for 30 days.
Andrew Tate appears to have returned to Twitter by challenging Logan Paul to a fight.
Energy
New British PM Rishi Sunak re-instituted a ban on fracking.
EU countries reached a provisional agreement to ban combustion vehicles by 2035.
A whistleblower report based on contents of the Hunter Biden laptop claimed Joe Biden was "complicit in six alleged white collar crimes," including using his role as VP for financial gain with Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Crypto
Honk Kong plans to legalize crypto trading.
Bitcoin Miner Core Scientific, the largest publicly traded miner in terms of hash rate, announced they are going to default on their upcoming debt payments. Miners have been getting squeezed by the combination of Bitcoin's drop in price, exploding hash rate, and rising energy prices.
The Blockchain Association filed an amicus brief to support Ripple in its court case against the SEC.
A committee of UK lawmakers voted to include stablecoin regulation in an upcoming crypto bill. New British PM Rishi Sunak is viewed as pro-cryptocurrency.
Forbes published an opinion piece predicting the SEC will suffer a "bruising defeat" in its case against Ripple. The outcome for the case could set precedent for the SEC's future attempts to regulate crypto.
The Dogecoin Foundation is co-producing an animated film called "The Shiba and the Whale" about Dogecoin.
According to an Unusual Whales report, FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried was the fifth-largest political donor this election cycle. Citadel's Ken Griffin was third, and George Soros was first.
India plans to launch its CBDC pilot on November 1st.
Edward Snowden tweeted a copy of the Bitcoin white paper.
Global Financial System
Credit Suisse plans to cut 9,000 jobs and raise $4 billion in new capital in a Saudi-led funding round.
Food System
A study found the world's largest group of nutritionists, The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, accepted millions of dollars from big pharma and big food.
Elon tweeted in praise of carbs and fasting while poking fun at Twitter's obsession with low-carb diets.
Social Media
Both Meta and Amazon plunged on earnings, providing to more Inverse Cramer moments.
Elon became the third most-followed account on Twitter, behind Obama and Justin Beiber.
Elon tweeted that it makes sense to structure Twitter so that it has different "game modes."
Meme Stonks
Fidelity ran a halloween costume ad depicting a meme stock investor.
The CEO of S3 partners predicted a parabolic move for GameStop if price breaks $30. The Ape community's antennae went up. Trading on GME was halted Monday morning as price broke $30, leading to more suspicion.
Congress members demanded the House finance committee convene a meeting with SEC chair Gary Gensler.
UFOs
A new UFO report that will be delivered to Congress blamed UFO sightings on enemy drones, space trash, and weather balloons.
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Memes of the Week
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