elon musk

It appears that memes are taking over the economy. If you've been keeping up with the GameStop saga and the rise of DOGE, by now you're probably well aware that bitcoin reached its all-time high of $48k early this morning. While bitcoin has been powering through its ascent for over a decade now and is certainly no meme stock, we can't deny that this forceful crypto rally may at least be loosely connected to the recent Reddit short squeeze meme schemes. Elon Musk has not-so-subtly been hyping both dogecoin and bitcoin for months—mysteriously putting 'bitcoin' into his Twitter bio, retweeting ridiculous pro-dogecoin memes, claiming that dogecoin is 'the people's crypto'—even Snoop Dogg (aka Snoop Doge) got in on the hype. But it all came to a head when Tesla announced its purchase of $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin on Monday. It didn't take long for the price of bitcoin to skyrocket to the moon. 

But how much further can bitcoin go? As more and more institutions adopt bitcoin as a legitimate form of currency, the plebs are wanting in, but many are wondering if they're too late. In retrospect, one could say there was never a bad time to buy bitcoin. Remember when one coin cost $9k a year ago? To be honest, I personally thought I was too late then. Now look at me. But obviously hindsight is clear as day, and the future of bitcoin is still foggy for those of us who need blockchain technology to be fully demystified before we can 'YOLO' our life-savings into cryptocurrency. If there's one thing we do know for sure, it's that the inherently viral nature of memes has shown to be a useful tool in pumping crypto. Just as r/WallStreetBets rallied to pump the GME short squeeze, subreddits like r/SatoshiStreetBets have been hyping altcoins like DOGE in order to raise the price floor. Some brush off dogecoin as a bubble or pyramid scheme that only functions as a pump and dump rather than a viable currency, but skeptics said the same thing about bitcoin in 2009, so who knows?

We can't say what the future holds for bitcoin, but we can offer what we know best—memes. We've got some amusing bitcoin memes and tweets both old and fresh for anyone who's either curious about crpyto for the first time or obsessive about checking those candlesticks every two minutes. 

The producers of Saturday Night Live have made some very questionable choices of hosts in the past. There have been many unfunny and controversial politicians as well as actors who should really just stick to dramas. Nobody lets SNL get away with this, they get roasted each time. You might think that they would learn from their mistakes, but they don't seem to give a flying f*ck.

SNL just announced that Elon Musk will be hosting in two weeks and Twitter is howling.

Elon Musk can't seem to stay out of the spotlight. SNL announced on Saturday that the South African billionaire would be hosting the show on May 8th with musical guest Miley Cyrus. The news came in SNL's classic index card format - featuring the date, the name of the host, and the name of the musical guest. 

🚀🚀🚀 pic.twitter.com/WyTGhSsSVg

— Saturday Night Live - SNL (@nbcsnl) April 24, 2021

It's true that weird nerds and Dogecoin enthusiasts may be celebrating the announcement, but there has actually been an impressive amount of backlash. While Dean Obeidallah penned an impressive op-ed decrying the choice, the most fervent and goofy protests have been in the form of memes.

What the hell is an NFT anyway? Non-Fungible Tokens are basically digital assets or collectors items, sort of like a rare Pokémon card that has gained value over time due to its scarcity, except NFTs only exist digitally on 'proof of work' blockchains, like Ethereum. When one buys an NFT, they aren't buying the image itself, but rather the token that points to the image or video and says 'this is the only one that exists.' Now people can even buy individual tweets as NFTs, but the way that works is a little more complicated, and frankly, we don't really get it. All we know is, Jack Dorsey is selling his first tweet ever for like, millions of dollars and 'Bad Luck Brian' sold an NFT of his school photo for 20 ETH (about $36,000 at the time). NFTs aren't only being used to sell digital art, the memes have unsurprisingly taken over and you can find everything from the 'Deal With It' sunglasses to 'Nyan Cat' selling for lots of money. All of this absurdity might seem like a harmless game to some—buying the metadata of original troll face for thousands of dollars in crypto? Sure, okay. But sadly minting NFTs on proof-of-work blockchain has disturbing environmental consequences. The average NFT that gets minted to the ETH network has the same carbon footprint as one European resident's electricity consumption for 1.5 months. So until we can figure out a more efficient way to sell digital assets, some suggest that participants in this madness will have to offset the environmental cost by doing things like reinvesting their gains into renewable energy.

We've collected some tweets that paint a picture of the current NFT frenzy—some from high-profile public figures who are participating and some reactions from people who are watching from the sidelines.

Elon Musk has really out-memed himself with his latest stunt. In a recent SEC filing, the CEO and CFO of Tesla have dubbed themselves Technoking of Tesla and Master of Coin, respectively. I mean, I suppose if you're one of the richest people in the world who can come back from the dead and whose tweets have the power to sway the meme-stock market, the world must look like some sort of game to you. Unsurprisingly, Twitter has some takes after waking up to the news of Musk's latest trolly moves, and we've collected some of the most amusing latest reactions. 

Okay first of all, let's get something out of the way: no, Elon Musk is not dead. We're not quite sure who is responsible for the initial spread of the rumor that Elon Musk died yesterday from a lithium battery explosion, but a handful of fake screenshots of news articles were circulated and caused chaos and confusion on the internet. It didn't take long for things to get set straight, but the truth didn't stop the memes. In fact, the debunking of the rumor seemed to spark even more memes, perhaps because the joke isn't so morbid if Elon is actually alive. At the end of the day, Elon Musk even tweeted an eye-roll emoji to help dispel the Twitter frenzy. We've collected some of the funniest memes that came out of today's chaotic internet prank. 

It's Mondaaaaay! The best day of the week, right, guys? No, not because you get to start a new work week or school week and be a productive human being. No, no. The reason Monday is the best day, of course, is because that means it's time for our weekly animal twitter treat segment, where we show you all the best, most talked about animals on twitter this week. 

There's something for everyone - funny, wholesome, adorable - twitter loves animals of all kinds. So yes, it may be a Monday, but at least you're gonna get to start it off in the best way possible. Enjoy, friends, and have an amazing, amazing week!

Happy Monday, y'all. We know a lot of you are supposed to be working, but there's something to be said for rewarding yourself for simply making things work. Before you surrender yourself to responsibility, it can be good to carve out a little time to just enjoy life. For some people that might mean a morning yoga practice or an extra large latte. For us? It's all about enjoying memes.

Sure, Twitter has its drawback. Painfully bad takes, constant political debates, and weird K-Pop in-jokes seem to inundate our feeds. It can be hard to sift through the madness and enjoy the humorous commentary and comedy writing that we actually want to see. In the spirit of making everyone's lives easier, we've taken the funny stuff (both old and new) and put it all in one convenient place. So you don't have to see some all caps tweet about how masks don't work or another opinion about the storming of the Capitol.