President-elect Donald Trump made a meme a reality this week when he announced Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, his former 2024 primary opponent, would head up a new cabinet-level office known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
It’s an entirely new agency … birthed by a crypto memelord who’s run afoul of the SEC.
On Aug. 3, Wayne Vaughan replied to a clip of a podcast interview with Musk, who said he had discussed the idea of a “government efficiency commission” with Trump.
Vaughan, a self-described Bitcoin memelord, commented, “Trump should establish a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and make @elonmusk the Chairman.”
Yesterday, he took a victory lap.
“Let it be known that the idea … came from the Bitcoin community,” wrote Vaughan on X, reveling in his influence.
He appears to be the first person to suggest the name for a Musk-headed government department, a reference to the popular Web 1.0 Doge meme that Musk loves.
The meme birthed a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin, which Musk frequently pumped. In 2022, Musk was sued for running a “pyramid scheme” to increase the value of Dogecoin, which shot up every time he posted about it.
A New York District Federal Judge dismissed the lawsuit in August. Musk continued to promote Dogecoin while the lawsuit was ongoing, including briefly changing Twitter’s logo to a Shiba Inu in 2023.
The DOGE name for a government department started to gain traction among cryptocurrency-focused accounts before being picked up by Musk.
Another account, Sir Doge of the Coin, whom Musk interacts with frequently, alerted him to the moniker on Aug. 19.
Musk commented, “That is the perfect name.”
The following day, Musk shared an AI-generated image of himself behind a plaque reading “D.O.G.E”.
Sir Doge of the Coin claimed to have thought of the name too, but today he credited Vaughan, who thanked him in return for bringing it to Musk’s attention.
“Such gentlemen, much wow!” he tweeted in … Doge voice.
But Musk and Vaughan share more than a penchant for outdated memes. Like Musk, Vaughan has had a run-in with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He is the founder and CEO of Tierion, a Texas-based cryptocurrency start-up that promises to notarize data on Bitcoin’s blockchain.
In late 2020, the SEC ruled that Tierion had been trading unregistered securities and ordered Tierion to return the $25 million it raised from customers who bought “tokens” that were meant to finance further business development.
The company was also fined $250,000.
However, unlike many other companies fined by the SEC for trading unregulated securities, Tierion has remained in business. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other cryptocurrencies are booming.
When Musk announced today that DOGE (the government department) would be producing merch, one of Vaughan’s followers suggested he sue for copyright infringement.
Vaughan insisted that the success of DOGE would be “worth more to me than any licensing fees.”
Musk’s vision for DOGE was laid out in an Aug. 20 tweet.
He wrote that he would “cut 90% of the staff like I did with Twitter, and massively improve operations at the same time.”
He went on to ask his followers: “Do you think I could successfully ‘Twitter’ the federal government?”
Since taking over the platform, Musk dramatically scaled back the number of staff. Twitter employs around half the number of people that it did before his tenure.
He also changed the iconic name and logo, discarding an instantly recognizable brand identity.
Musk removed almost all moderation from the platform, leading to an exodus of advertisers and rendering the platform’s “blue check” verification system meaningless, allowing anyone to buy into it for $8 a month.
These, and several other changes led to an exodus from the platform. The declining user base and steep drop in advertiser revenue caused the company’s value to plummet.
Analysis from the Washington Post in September suggests it is worth $24 billion less than when Musk took over, more than halving the value of the social media company.
Whether the federal government will meet a similar fate remains to be seen.
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