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Conceived as a frivolous parody of Bitcoin, Dogecoin has held surprisingly well, boasting one of the strongest communities in the crypto landscape and an $18 billion market cap at the time of writing. Having skyrocketed a mind-boggling 147,592% from its ATL in May 2015, Dogecoin produced hundreds of millionaires—but the co-founder of the first meme coin wasn’t among the lucky ones, at least in his own words.
How did it happen that the man behind the perhaps wildest crypto success story couldn’t retire comfortably at his own private island sipping pina coladas till the end of his days? If you wonder the same thing, read on to learn more about Billy Markus’ net worth, career, and Twitter feud with his fellow co-founder.
Who is Billy Markus of Dogecoin?
Billy Markus was born in 1983, in Portland, Oregon, United States. Known also under his Twitter/X alias Shibetoshi Nakamoto, he is an American programmer and a co-creator of the first meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he launched in late 2013 with his friend Jackson Palmer. The duo didn’t expect that their project would take off this far, as Dogecoin was conceived as a joke poking funs at serious projects like Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Before creating Dogecoin, Billy Markus was employed at IBM as a senior software engineer. Besides this fact, little is known about Markus’ career and personal life, as the Dogecoin co-founder has largely remained out of the public spotlight. He is active on Twitter/X, where he has amassed 2.1 million followers since April 2009.
The creation of Dogecoin
Jackson Palmer, who at the time worked as a software engineer for Adobe marketing department in Sydney, Australia, is credited with bringing the idea of Dogecoin to life. He purchased the domain name, dogecoin.com, and made a website that featured the face of a meme dog Kabosu with some comic sans text slapped on the image, which has since become the signature design of the coin.
Billy Markus came across the website by accident and had the idea of launching a cryptocurrency with the same name. He reached out to Palmer and the duo started developing the project together.
“Jackson, my co-founder, drank a beer one day and thought it’d be amusing to buy dogecoin.com and make a website without a cryptocurrency,” Markus told Boardroom.com in an email interview. “I ran across the website randomly and thought it would be funny to make the actual Dogecoin. I threw it together in a few hours, and we launched it, and then it took off, and lots of crazy stuff happened since.”
Markus developed the Dogecoin protocol using existing projects such as Luckycoin and Litecoin, both of which use scrypt technology in their proof-of-work algorithm. This means that Dogecoin miners cannot use mining hardware designed for Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm and instead have to splurge on pricey field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) devices. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a finite supply of 21 million coins, Dogecoin doesn’t have a cap on how many DOGE can be there. Although the project started with an intended supply limit of 100 billion, all these coins were mined by mid-2015, so every year thereafter additional 5 billion were put into circulation. Dogecoin’s blockchain doesn’t support native smart contracts.
Dogecoin and Elon Musk
Dogecoin (DOGE) was a nearly overnight success, reaching more transactions per day than Bitcoin when it was just 2-weeks old, jumping nearly 300% in value in December 2013. The Dogecoin community has promoted the coin through numerous charitable initiatives, such as getting the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics and building a well in the Tana river basin in Kenya. The meme crypto also carved a niche for itself as an internet tipping currency.
Besides the fundraising efforts from the Dogecoin community, there was another decisive factor that catapulted its popularity, namely Elon Musk’s infatuation with the meme coin. The tech mogul spent much of his appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live to promote Dogecoin, tweeted about the cryptocurrency on several occasions, and replaced the Twitter bird logo with Kabosu for a couple of days in April 2023. The price of Dogecoin saw a massive spike nearly every time Musk paid attention to it.
The billionaire also made efforts to incorporate Dogecoin into his EV manufacturer and aerospace company. At Tesla, the meme coin can be used to purchase merchandise, with a hint from Musk that it will be possible to pay for cars with DOGE at some point in the future. Meanwhile, SpaceX announced in May 2021 that it would accept Dogecoin as payment for its lunar mission “DOGE-1.” The mission planned to fly a 40-kilogram cube satellite equipped with sensors and cameras to capture the data from the Moon’s surface as a payload on a Falcon 9 rocket, saying that it “will demonstrate the application of cryptocurrency beyond Earth orbit and set the foundation for interplanetary commerce.” Another purpose of “DOGE-1” would be to broadcast to Earth advertising from its billboard. The parameters of each individual ad, such as height, width, brightness, hue, and placement time on the screen, would be controlled through tokenized Xi Protocol claims.
The mission has been initially scheduled to share a ride on Falcon 9 with a payload for a joint mission between Intuitive Machines and NASA. While the mission has been postponed several times by SpaceX, when it finally launched it didn’t take DOGE-1 aboard as it wasn’t ready at the time. Currently, there are no defined timelines for the satellite launch.
Despite the initial hype around Musk’s plans to turn Twitter/X into an “everything app” that would allegedly involve using Dogecoin for in-app microtransactions, no evidence for crypto features has been discovered in regulatory paperwork submitted by the company’s subsidiary X Payments.
Why did Billy Markus leave Dogecoin?
Despite being a co-founder, Billy Markus has left the project quite early, in 2015, after experiencing harassment from some members of the community and seeing the project drift from its original vision. Fellow co-founder Jackson Palmer left around the same time, leaving the project in the hands of Dogecoin Core, the team of experienced devs dedicated to supporting the meme coin.
In the words of Billy Markus, he didn’t keep any substantial Dogecoin holdings, as he sold his tokens in 2015 after being laid off and having trouble staying afloat. The money he made from the sale of Dogecoin was just enough to buy a used Hond Civic. Currently, he is working full-time as a software engineer, and although he is not struggling to make ends meet, he can’t afford to retire yet.
Billy Markus is not a millionaire
In November 2023, Markus tweeted a cropped screenshot of an unnamed article claiming that the Dogecoin co-creator is worth an estimated $5 million but is no longer interested in making money.
Markus found the report hilarious but misleading, stating that he’s still pretty much interested in making money but his real net worth is way under $1 million, which is the reason why he still keeps working. He also mentioned that it gets annoying being attacked for his involvement into the project by people who made way more from the meme coin than himself.
The founder also mentioned that he used to be not so money-oriented while living in Oregon where costs of living are relatively low, but has become much more angsty about money after moving to California (presumably for his software engineering job).
Why did two co-founders part their ways?
Although both Markus and Palmer had left the Dogecoin project early on, their stance on crypto currently reflects a sharp contrast between the two founders. Unlike Markus, who is a prolific poster on Twitter/X and has since morphed into one of Elon Musk’s “reply guys,” Palmer has become increasingly critical of the billionaire and the crypto industry in general.
On several occasions, Palmer referred to Musk as a “self-absorbed grifter,” questioning the billionaire’s claimed engineering prowess after he failed to run a bot-purging Python script written by Palmer. Musk felt compelled to defend his honor, claiming that his kids wrote better code at 12 years old and falsely accusing Plamer of not having written a single line of Dogecoin code.
After abandoning Dogecoin years ago, Palmer grew disillusioned with the crypto market, denouncing it as an “inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology.” In a viral thread on Twitter/X, he also claimed that the industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures and stated that he has no plans to make a comeback. Palmer has also started an anti-crypto podcast called Griftonomics.
Palmer's anti-crypto stance and dislike for Elon Musk presumably became the main reason the two co-founders parted their ways for good: in August 2022, Palmer shared a screenshot of him being blocked by Markus on Twitter/X.
