Doge was started for fun. “The joke is on Wall Street this time,” said Mati Greenspan, portfolio manager and founder of Quantum Economics. “What you have is a situation where teens on TikTok are outperforming even the smartest suits by thousands of percentage points.”

In 2013, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched the satirical cryptocurrency as a way to make fun of bitcoin and the many other cryptocurrencies boasting grand plans to take over the world.

It isn’t totally clear when or why dogecoin captured the heart of Elon Musk.

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO has spent years talking up the token.

Musk’s tweets with sometimes oblique references to dogecoin often send it to new record-high prices. These posts have also helped drive retail investor interest.

“You have this one guy who is sort of like the cult leader,” said Asheesh Birla, a general manager at Ripple, which manages an alternative cryptocurrency used for payments.

Musk, however, isn’t alone in his celebrity endorsement of the animal-branded token. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, Snoop Dogg and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons have all publicly rallied behind dogecoin. Even beef jerky brand Slim Jim is getting in on the action.

“The real value is in today’s meme-driven culture, and doge represents the network value of memetics, which may prove to be enormous,” explained Bucella. “If at some point, the doge community decides to implement a burn or new supply mechanism, via a protocol hard fork, then this value will have a higher likelihood of being retained long-term.”