In what financial historians will surely document as the most expensive joke in economic history, Tesla ($TSLA) has completed its remarkable transformation from “revolutionary electric vehicle company” to “extremely expensive internet meme that occasionally manufactures cars.” This evolution has placed it firmly in the same investment category as Dogecoin—a cryptocurrency literally created to mock cryptocurrency, which now has a market cap larger than many Fortune 500 companies because a billionaire tweeted about it while presumably sitting on his toilet.
Welcome to 2025’s financial markets, where stock fundamentals are made up and the points don’t matter. It’s the investment equivalent of paying $50,000 for an NFT of a cartoon ape smoking a cigar, except the ape occasionally announces self-driving features that don’t actually self-drive.
The Curious Case of Parallel Financial Delusions
The smoking gun evidence of Tesla’s complete memeification appeared this month when Dogecoin surged 10% while Tesla simultaneously hemorrhaged $160 billion in market value following Trump’s tariff announcements.1 This price divergence between Musk’s two favorite financial playthings has shocked exactly no one who’s been paying attention to the fundamentally absurd nature of both assets.
“Tesla’s share price has nothing to do with its actual profits or function as a car business,” explains investment legend Bill Gross, who recently noted Tesla had begun acting like meme stocks such as Chewy2. Gross’s observation, while correct, is approximately four years too late—Tesla crossed the meme Rubicon long ago, around the same time Musk decided “funding secured” was an appropriate way to announce a potential company buyout at $420 per share because, and I quote directly, it’s “a weed reference”.3
Connect these three seemingly unrelated dots:
- Tesla’s market cap exceeds that of the next nine most valuable automakers (Toyota, BYD, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen, Stellantis, and General Motors) combined.
- Dogecoin was literally created as a joke to parody irrational crypto speculation.
- Both assets experience dramatic price swings based primarily on Elon Musk’s social media activity.4
The elementary truth, dear reader? Tesla and Dogecoin aren’t investments—they’re expensive digital mood rings that change color based on Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) feed.
The Financial Ouroboros: When Memes Eat Their Own Tail
In the beginning, Dogecoin was created as a lighthearted parody, featuring a Shiba Inu to mock the often illogical nature of crypto speculation. Its creators, software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, intended it as a humorous jab at crypto hype. Fast forward to 2025, and this satirical creation has become precisely the kind of speculative asset it was designed to mock—largely thanks to one man’s Twitter habit.
Similarly, Tesla began as an innovative electric vehicle company that made real products solving real problems. Now it’s valued as though every human on Earth will soon own three Cybertrucks, despite the company’s fluctuating sales, product issues, and the fact that its flagship software only functions properly for “an elite few”.
“For years now, Tesla’s share price has been entirely unmoored from the company’s actual business—a meme stock,” notes a Quartz analysis. This assessment aligns perfectly with a Binance study finding that between March 2021 and March 2024, Tesla and Dogecoin prices moved in tandem 62.5% of the time, creating what analysts delicately termed a “suicide pact” between the assets.5
The cosmic joke reached its zenith when Tesla officially incorporated Dogecoin as a payment option for merchandise purchases. The car company that’s supposedly revolutionizing transportation now accepts payment in a currency featuring a cartoon dog that was explicitly created to mock the idea of cryptocurrency having value. This is the financial equivalent of a snake consuming itself while livestreaming the experience on TikTok.
Inside the Mind of a Tesla-Dogecoin Investor: A Psychological Examination
To understand the psychology behind Tesla and Dogecoin investments, I spoke with Dr. Eleanor Rigby, a behavioral economist specializing in meme-based financial decisions at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Financial Delusions.
“What we’re seeing is a fascinating cognitive phenomenon I call ‘narrative substitution,'” explains Dr. Rigby. “Investors have replaced traditional valuation metrics with story-based investments. For Tesla investors, they’re not buying a car company—they’re buying ‘Elon Musk will single-handedly save humanity through technology.’ For Dogecoin holders, they’re purchasing ‘I’m in on the joke with the world’s richest man.'”
This psychological mechanism explains why Tesla’s stock responded so dramatically to Musk’s CPAC 2025 appearance, where he described himself as “living the meme” while discussing Dogecoin.6 When your investment thesis is essentially “funny internet man make number go up,” actual business performance becomes irrelevant.
“Tesla has achieved something remarkable,” continues Dr. Rigby. “It’s a company that can lose $160 billion in market value in a week, and investors will still defend it by saying ‘but Mars colonies!’ This is the financial equivalent of staying in a terrible relationship because ‘they might change.'”
The Musk Effect: When One Man’s Twitter Feed Controls Billions
The true architect of this financial farce is, of course, Elon Musk himself—a man who has turned market manipulation into performance art so compelling that regulators have essentially thrown up their hands and declared “I guess this is just how things work now.”
Consider the evidence:
When Musk referred to Dogecoin in an April 2019 tweet as his favorite cryptocurrency, the coin’s price doubled in two days.7 Two years later, his X posts declaring “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” triggered an overnight trading volume surge of over 50%. Meanwhile, his infamous 2018 tweet about taking Tesla private at $420 a share sent markets into such a frenzy that it triggered an SEC lawsuit.8
The Musk Effect has become so powerful that financial analysts now include a “Musk Tweet Probability Factor” in their models. When Tesla’s stock hit exactly $420 in December 2024, it wasn’t treated as a random price point but as a “milestone packed with meme significance” because in the Musk financial universe, juvenile drug references are actually meaningful economic indicators.
The Tesla-Dogecoin Divergence: Trouble in Meme Paradise?
The most intriguing development in this absurdist financial theater occurred this month, when Dogecoin and Tesla prices suddenly diverged. While Tesla shed $160 billion in market value following Trump’s tariff announcements, Dogecoin surged 10%. This uncoupling raises a fascinating question: Is Dogecoin finally breaking free from its Musk dependency?
“The directional difference between Dogecoin and Tesla prices begs a fundamental issue for investors: Is Dogecoin starting to separate from Elon Musk’s long-standing influence?” asks one analysis.9 This potential decoupling comes as Musk’s role in Trump’s administration has failed to yield the anticipated government adoption of Dogecoin, with Musk clarifying there were “no current plans” to incorporate it into official government digital infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Tesla stock opened at $245 on Tuesday, having tumbled 17.5% following Trump’s tariff announcement. After this bloodbath, Musk shared a video of economist Milton Friedman criticizing trade tariffs—a move that demonstrated both his growing political influence and how his companies remain vulnerable to his new political entanglements.
Welcome to the Meme Economy, Where Nothing Matters and Everything’s Made Up
The Tesla-Dogecoin phenomenon represents the logical conclusion of late-stage capitalism—a financial system so disconnected from reality that it has essentially become a multiplayer video game where the objective is to predict the behavior of one erratic billionaire.
Consider this: When Tesla’s stock plummeted following tariff announcements, it wasn’t because the underlying business had changed overnight. The factories were the same. The products were the same. The demand was the same. What changed was the narrative. And in today’s meme economy, narrative trumps reality every time.
This is why a cryptocurrency featuring a Shiba Inu created as satire can be worth billions, and why a car company with persistent production issues can be valued higher than Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, Ford, and every other major automaker combined.
Dr. Rigby frames it perfectly: “We’ve entered a post-rationality market where assets are valued not by what they do, but by how they make us feel. Tesla and Dogecoin make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves—a community, a movement, an inside joke. The fact that one is a struggling car company and the other is literally a joke doesn’t matter when the emotional attachment is the actual product being sold.”
The Great Financial Hallucination of 2025
At the heart of both Tesla and Dogecoin is a fascinating paradox: both were created to disrupt established systems (automotive and banking respectively), yet both have become extreme manifestations of the speculative excess they were supposedly fighting against.
Erwin Voloder, Head of Policy of the European Blockchain Association, nailed this irony perfectly: “Musk’s involvement transformed Dogecoin from a satirical internet token into a speculative asset class by bestowing it with perceived legitimacy and entertainment value… The irony is that a coin created to mock irrational investing became the poster child of irrational investing”.
This same analysis applies perfectly to Tesla—a company founded to accelerate sustainable transportation that has transformed into a vehicle for speculative excess so extreme that its market cap defies all traditional financial logic.
And here we are in 2025, watching as the two untethered financial entities in Musk’s orbit—Tesla and Dogecoin—potentially begin to separate, like twin stars drifting apart after orbiting the same eccentric center of gravity for years.
The most telling quote about this phenomenon comes from Musk himself during his CPAC 2025 appearance: “Doge began as a meme. Just think about it. And now, it’s real. Isn’t that wild? But it’s great”.10 Replace “Doge” with “Tesla’s market cap” and the statement remains equally accurate—a perfect distillation of our financial reality where the line between meme and value no longer exists.
For investors in both Tesla and Dogecoin, this memeification represents either the democratization of finance or its complete surrender to absurdity, depending on your perspective. Either way, both assets have conclusively proven that in 2025, financial value isn’t determined by business fundamentals or utility—it’s determined by whatever Elon Musk decides to tweet after his morning coffee.
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References
- https://www.mitrade.com/au/insights/news/live-news/article-5-747356-20250409 ↩︎
- https://qz.com/elon-musk-tesla-meme-stock-1851588312 ↩︎
- https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/tesla-stock-hits-420-a-milestone-packed-with-meme-significance ↩︎
- https://www.tradingview.com/news/benzinga:c5ba173db094b:0-tesla-s-dogecoin-adoption-sends-crypto-market-into-frenzy-meme-coin-surges-by-over-21/ ↩︎
- https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/5591135268082 ↩︎
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dogecoins-journey-memecoin-real-money-193015496.html ↩︎
- https://www.mitrade.com/au/insights/news/live-news/article-3-756428-20250412 ↩︎
- https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/tesla-stock-hits-420-a-milestone-packed-with-meme-significance ↩︎
- https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/22651340231794 ↩︎
- https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dogecoins-journey-memecoin-real-money-193015496.html ↩︎
