It didn’t take long for degens to dance on the grave of longtime crypto hater and Warren Buffett consigliere Charlie Munger, who died yesterday at the age of 99.
In fact, It took less than 15 minutes after Berkshire Hathaway announced its vice chairman’s passing for a Munger memecoin (MUNGER) to debut on decentralized exchange Uniswap. Those intrepid degen reflexes appear to have paid off: The Ethereum-based token is up 409% in the last 24 hours, according to GeckoTerminal. Shortly after its launch, the token was up over 31,500%.
To be clear, MUNGER is still six decimal spots shy of being worth more than a penny—it’s sitting at just $0.00000001884 as of this writing. It’s also highly volatile, and is already down 34% in the last hour. But that hasn’t stopped irony-poisoned meme coin traders from pumping the token with $3.57 million in trading volume since yesterday. The coin currently sits at a market capitalization just north of $132,000—though that figure, too, is already falling.
How would the late Munger take the news that his passing lined the pockets of at least a few “shitcoin” aficionados? Probably not very kindly.
Charlie Munger meme coin up 31,500% in the last hour
God would he hate this pic.twitter.com/9sU5BCSZB2
— Michael McQuaid (@michaelgmcquaid) November 28, 2023
“I’m not proud of my country for allowing this crypto shit,” Munger said earlier this year. “It’s worthless, it’s no good.”
The year prior Munger compared crypto to a venereal disease, skewering the entire industry as “beneath contempt.”
“I just think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization,” he said at the time.
And that’s not even to get into Bitcoin specifically, which he routinely referred to as “rat poison.”
‘Rat Poison’: Cantankerous Bitcoin Critic Charlie Munger Dies at 99
Meme coins have a rich and storied history of capitalizing on breaking news to pump highly speculative tokens of questionable origin. Just last week, a freshly-minted CZ token, created in the immediate aftermath of Changpeng Zhao’s shocking resignation as Binance’s CEO, pumped 18,000%.
That price movement comes with a hefty price tag, however: Meme coins like MUNGER are routinely “rug-pulled” by their anonymous creators, who withdraw liquidity and leave investors holding the bag.
Such moves could be condemned as “massively stupid,” “evil,” “no good,” or “very dangerous.” But that’s nothing Munger hasn’t said already.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
