The ‘Doge’ dog meme that Elon Musk loves, explained in 1 minute

• Elon Musk will officially head the Department of Government Efficiency along with Vivek Ramaswamy.

• The acronym, ‘DOGE’, also refers to a meme that inspired a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.

• Here’s a quick look at the history of the meme, which originated with a photo of a Shiba Inu dog.

Elon Musk apparently can’t get enough of “Doge,” a popular internet meme from the 2010s.

The four-letter word is also the abbreviation for the Ministry of Government Efficiency, a new Trump initiative aimed at reducing government costs, which will be led by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

However, Musk has long talked about the ‘Doge’ meme before throwing Trump into the governing council.

So what is the meme about?

Here’s the 1 minute version:

• Doge was created in 2010 when Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato posted a photo of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu dog, on her blog.

• The photo showed the Shiba Inu on a couch with a tilted head and a surprised expression.

• The image’s first use as a meme is unclear, but Reddit helped popularize it and it quickly became an internet sensation, with remakes of the photo being shared with humorous Comic Sans text floating around the dog’s head.

• The meme later inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which started in 2013 as a joke between two software engineers, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. Dogecoin was built from the open-source software project Litecoin.

• The cryptocurrency, that carries the slogan “the people’s cryptocurrency,” became popular on Reddit and quickly grew to a market cap of $8 million after its creation. The price of Dogecoin peaked at $0.72 in May 2021 during the meme stock trading frenzy and Musk’s endorsement of the cryptocurrency.

Musk once attributed his interest in the Doge meme to the fact that it features dogs and “the best humor.”

The Tesla CEO has continued to post about Doge and Dogecoin over the years. SpaceX named a small satellite designed to explore the moon “DOGE-1” and people have been able to buy Tesla and SpaceX merchandise using Dogecoin.

Dogecoin’s price recently rose 157% following Trump’s re-election, reaching a market cap of $53 billion as the broader crypto market and Bitcoin soared in anticipation of looser regulations from the Trump administration.

Read the original article Business insider