That time some rando turned me into a meme coin

We had barely started dinner when my wife asked what was wrong. “I think someone made one of my tweets into a meme coin.” She said, “I’m not sure I know what those words mean.” I replied, “I’m not sure I do either.”

It started innocently enough. A stranger reached out on LinkedIn with what I thought was a question about a Mastodon server where I’m a moderator. But they didn’t want to talk about Mastodon:

Every word in that message is English, but it might as well have been a foreign language. I read it several times trying to decipher what they were saying.

I thought it might be scam and was tempted to block the person, but I decided to dig in a little further before doing so. I’m glad I did.

If communities existed on Twitter before Elon Musk ruined it, I never used them. So when I opened the “grigs X community,” I was beyond confused.

Scrolling through the tweets in the community was even more incomprehensible and disconcerting. There were numerous AI generated images of me. Many of the images included Elon Musk and tagged his account as well. If this was a scam, it was the most elaborate scam I’d ever been the target of.

What in the world was going on?

Fortunately, I had recently listened to an excellent podcast episode from Planet Money that explained meme coins. After some digging, I found the $grigs meme coin on pump.fun, a website that makes it simple to create meme coins.

The meme coin had been created a couple days earlier and had a market cap of around $12,000. So now I understood what the Twitter community was talking about, but why did they make a meme coin of me?

Planet Money’s meme coin podcast came in clutch again. I remembered part of the podcast where they talked about how important opinion leaders are for getting meme coins off the ground and how everyone wanted one particular opinion leader to notice their coins:

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Zeke says there is one key leader whose opinion seems to be valued above all others in the world of meme coins, a man who has taken the joke so far as to helm a controversial new government entity named after that original Doge meme.

FAUX: What is really ideal is if Elon Musk will talk about whatever the coin is about.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Like, one of the big reasons Dogecoin is still the most valuable meme coin is because Elon Musk started tweeting about it in 2019.

FAUX: But it’s not just Dogecoin. A lot of the most successful coins have had some connection to Elon Musk.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Elon Musk is like the meme coin market mover-in-chief.

That explained why so many of the AI images people contained Elon Musk and I. Most tweets tagged Musk as well.

Why were people so bullish that Musk might be interested in $grigs coin? Because Musk had named his AI chatbot Grok, and I was the first person to use the word “grok” on Twitter back in July 2007 when I wrote, “trying to grok twitter.”

It finally made sense. This is why so many of the tweets and images in the community called me a time traveler, implied that I was secretly the original CTO of Twitter, or wildly, that my account was actually a Musk burner account.

The whole community was trying to get Musk to engage with the coin, but none of them knew that I had blocked Musk long ago.

I finally understood what was going on, but I had no idea what to do with this information.

The people behind the meme coin wanted me to promote it. They attempted to transfer coins to me so I would be incentivized to shill my meme coin.

I wanted to do the opposite. Meme coins are scams that rely on finding a greater fool. But would talking about the meme coin, even to badmouth it, just give it more attention and drive up the price?

I searched for articles by people who had been in similar situations, but couldn’t find any information. I reached out to several communities seeking guidance and got some good general feedback. Unfortunately, no one could predict what the impact on the coin’s valuation would be if I spoke up.

I slept on the problem and in the morning, I listened to a second Planet Money meme coin episode called, “The Parable of the Peanut Memecoin.” It was instructive.

Someone made Peanut the Squirrel into a meme coin without the knowledge of Peanut’s owner. Peanut’s owner was given some tokens to promote the meme coin just like I had. Unlike me, he accepted the gift and started promoting the meme coin. The price went up and he sold his coins to help fund his plans for an animal rescue. The community immediately turned on him and attacked him relentlessly. The whole episode is worth a listen.

If I wanted to avoid a similar fate, I couldn’t be silent. I needed to publicly disown the coin that bore my image:

Yesterday, I learned that there is a meme coin based on a tweet of mine from 2007. The coin is using my profile image. I have no affiliation with the coin. I do not own any of the tokens. Someone tried to give me some tokens, but I don’t have a crypto wallet.

The 2007 tweet appears to be of interest because I used the verb grok. They say it is the first time grok was used on Twitter. I haven’t verified that. It seems many aren’t aware that grok is a verb invented by Robert A. Heinlein in 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land.

Many years after my 2007 tweet, Musk named his AI bot Grok. Because of this, people are hoping that Musk will see my 2007 tweet and respond to it. That’s unlikely. I blocked Musk in 2023 when he changed the algorithm to promote his own tweets.

Here’s the thing. Crypto is scam. Musk is an assclown. The only good thing that may come of this is that more people will read Stranger in a Strange Land. It is a wonderful and moving piece of fiction. I highly recommend it.

I’d like to think this thread is why the meme coin never took off, but other events likely did the coin in. Less than two days after I disavowed the coin, Musk and Trump were in a full-blown Twitter feud culminating with Musk saying Trump was in the Epstein files.

It seems Musk was too busy to grok the full potential of $grigs coin.