Elon Musk does his thing again, helping to pump and dump meme coins
Tesla's boss, and now a close ally of Donald Trump, is back at stirring the meme coin market, helping to skyrocket two tokens before they crashed.
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Tesla's boss, and now a close ally of Donald Trump, is back at stirring the meme coin market, helping to skyrocket two tokens before they crashed.
First, on December 31st, Musk started posting pictures inspired by the Kekius Maximus Pepe the Frog meme, adding "Brothers in Arms" to one post and adding that "Kekius Maximus will soon reach level 80 in hardcore PoE" to another one. The latter reference is likely related to the video game Path of Exile 2, played by Musk.
If that wasn’t enough, the reportedly richest person in the world changed his X profile name to Kekius Maximus, which is also inspired by the Maximus Decimus Meridius character from the Gladiator film.
Brothers in Arms pic.twitter.com/vIZ8ADrXbo
undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 31, 2024
All this was enough for the namesake memecoin Kekius Maximus (KEKIUS) to skyrocket by more than 3,400% in less than a day. However, as Musk changed his profile name back on Wednesday, the price crashed almost 80% before somewhat recovering and is still up over 2,230% in a week. The trading volume also skyrocketed from around $5 million per day to $390 million at some point on Thursday.
Some traders saw their initial investment of less than $100 turn into a $3 million paper profit, which they failed to fully realize before the dump happened. However, some still managed to make millions on this gamble. At the time of writing, the token has more than 25,300 holders.
Turned $66 into $3.05M in just 18 days, a 45,906x return!
undefined Lookonchain (@lookonchain) January 1, 2025
This trader spent 0.017 $ETH($66) to buy 10.17M $KEKIUS and sold 2.81M $KEKIUS for 60.3 $ETH($201K), leaving 7.37M $KEKIUS($2.85M).
The total profit is $3.05M.https://t.co/gx6E6yFQcz pic.twitter.com/rFrsNjCqvt
Once again, it worked, and the price of the CumRocket (CUMMIES) meme coin spiked 426% in around half an hour before crashing more than 70%. The price is still up 86% in a day. The 24-hour trading volume jumped from around $49,000 to around $10 million.
It’s not the first time Musk has played with meme coins. He’s also known for his influence on the price of Dogecoin (DOGE), the oldest and most popular meme coin. DOGE is still down 54% from its all-time highs in 2021.
