Memecoin trader briefly becomes millionaire off throwaway Elon Musk X gag
One lucky trader has seemingly turned $10,000 into just over $1 million less than 10 days after purchasing the Troll (TROLL) memecoin just moments after Elon Musk changed his bio on X (formerly Twitter) to “Chief Troll Officer.”
Etherscan data cited by blockchain data provider LookOnChain shows the trader converted a total of 4.3 Ether ( ETH ) — worth approximately $10,000 at the time — into 19 trillion TROLL tokens.
In just 10 days, this trader turned $300 into $1.03M!
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) January 17, 2024
How did he do it?
After noticing that @elonmusk had changed his Twitter profile to "(CTO) Chief Troll Officer", this trader immediately withdrew 4.313 $ETH ($10,113) from #Binance and spent 4.3 $ETH to buy 19.37T $TROLL .… pic.twitter.com/NWO7j4pyq4
On the same day, the trader sold 9 trillion TROLL tokens to cover their buy-in, holding the remaining 10 trillion tokens, which, at one point, were worth $1.34 million.
The price has fallen since then, but the TROLL stack is still worth a staggering $864,000 at current prices, equating to an 8,540% gain from his initial capital.
TROLL was initially launched in April 2023 and, like all memecoins, experienced a brief price surge before retracing to near its launch price. That all changed on Jan. 9 when Musk changed his X bio and sent the token surging over 150,000% in three days.
In 2021, a single well-timed Musk tweet had the power to send his then-favorite memecoin, Dogecoin ( DOGE ), skyrocketing.
Related: Dogecoin investors accuse Elon Musk of insider trading in amended class-action lawsuit
It happened again when a non-affiliated memecoin drawing its namesake from Musk’s AI project, dubbed “Grok,” suddenly became one of the largest memecoins in space.
At its peak price of $0.027 on Nov. 13, Grok (GROK) commanded a market capitalization of nearly $200 million, making it one of the largest new memecoins in the current cycle.
Those who came late to the GROK hype were burned after an X post from blockchain sleuth ZachXBT revealed that various social media accounts and websites tied to Grok were repurposed from old projects.
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