Elon Musk appears to have ignored a $600,000 statue of him as a goat—a bizarre cryptocurrency marketing stunt—Twitter/ REUTERS, February 6, 2019. The statement doesn’t mention how much Musk was paid to participate in the stunt, but it sounds like he was paid a lot.
On Nov. 26, the co-founders of the meme-based memecoin Elon Goat Token (EGT) sent Elon Musk’s 30-foot, 12,000-pound metal statue to Tesla’s Austin headquarters as part of a publicity stunt.
Elon Musk is shown on a goat’s head as a rocket-riding dog in the statue. Musk is also wearing a Dogecoin collar.
The EGT whitepaper claims that the entire concept was engineered to be roadworthy and fastened to a 50-foot semi-trailer for transportation. A conceptual design was drawn and rendered in Los Angeles.
The founders of EGT, who are known as “Elon Superfans,” stated in the project description on their website that they wanted to make their project recognised and legitimate by getting an approval from Musk.
EGT’s $600,000 monument has failed to gain any public acknowledgment from Musk himself, at least on Twitter.
Despite this, it still received a lot of mainstream media coverage, including from the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and The Washington Post.
There Are Plentiful Musk-themed tokens Out There
EGT was launched on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in Jan. 2022, and it is unknown what EGT’s purpose is other than that it was created. No other information is available on it. It has been criticised for its Musk-centred marketing plan and lack of features upon launch.
Elon Musk-themed tokens, like Dogelon Mars (ELON) and spaceTwitterDoge and elonDogeTwit, are also attempting to utilise the entrepreneur’s fame to market their tokens. Other tokens using Musk’s fame include Elon Mars (ELON).
According to Coingecko and Coinmarketcap, EGT has 18,400 and 86,800 followers, respectively, on Twitter. Both lists EGT, but neither has information regarding its market cap. After the unveiling of the statue, the price skyrocketed and subsequently plunged to month-low levels.
EGT claims to have moved smart contracts from BSC to the Ethereum blockchain in order to make real utility in the DeFi (decentralized finance) space.
Crypto projects have utilized over-the-top publicity stunts as a common method for generating publicity in the past.
In 2018, Ukrainian social network ASKfm launched an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) by leaving a wallet with 500,000 tokens at the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain above sea level in the world.
At the time, ASKfm calculated the tokens in the wallet at $50,000, a sum calculated by an estimate of their value once the pre-sale and ICO launch.
In 2018, an Epoch Cryptocurrency site’s owner dropped money off a roof in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong to attract attention to a competition where participants might win large sums of money.
According to Rahul Advani, APAC Policy Director of Ripple, crypto must shift away from “hype cycles” and focus on “real utility.”
He said that the fall of FTX will prompt regulators and governments to scrutinize crypto regulations much more closely.
