It was a bad year for Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend Grimes, who tried to make herself a meme after their breakup. Even though this year, the Musk mess-up is probably the one that’s stuck in our minds the most. In May, he was the host of SNL.
Musk was the first person who wasn’t an entertainer or an athlete to host the show since Donald Trump did it in 2015. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It had become the fourth biggest digital coin by market value before the show. Dogecoin is made up of memes about Shiba Inu dogs. In his tweets about the coin, Musk said things like, “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto.” This helped make the coin more popular, which made it more popular.
Dogecoin had become so popular that it made up 34% of Robinhood’s crypto trading revenue in the first three months of the year. The trading platform said that if the price of dogecoin went down, it could hurt its business.
Well, they were right. Musk called dogecoin a “hustle” in a sketch on Saturday Night Live. The price of dogecoin fell 36% during the sketch, and it hasn’t come back. In terms of market value, dogecoin is now the 12th-largest cryptocurrency.
Then again, it wasn’t all cringe-y. This is how it works: SNL won an Emmy, but it wasn’t because of the way they made Musk look like Wario. The episode that Musk hosted won the award for Outstanding Contemporary Makeup in a Variety, Nonfiction, or Reality Program.
——-
This is the second-place winner: Mark Zuckerberg’s tweet on July 4. The Meta CEO made a lot of cringe-worthy videos this year, but his Fourth of July post, which showed him holding an American flag while riding a hydrofoil surfboard while John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” played, is probably the most cringe-worthy.
Second place: The “family picture” from the G-7. If Tyra Banks had seen this year’s G-7 summit group photo from Cornwall, England, in June, she would have had a heart attack. Before a three-day meeting where they talked about important issues like the Covid economic recovery and fighting climate change, the world’s top leaders looked a little weird. It was also Biden’s first meeting as president outside of the United States, so it was important for him.