Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, seems to have turned his back on a $600,000 statue of him as a goat. The statue was made as part of a strange crypto marketing stunt.
The 30-foot, 12,000-pound metal statue of Elon Musk was sent to Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, Texas, on November 26. It was part of a publicity stunt by the creators of the meme coin Elon Goat Token (EGT).
The head of Elon Musk is on a goat’s body, and the goat is riding a rocket. On the statue, Musk is also wearing a dog collar with a Dogecoin DOGE.
Related: After Elon Musk’s ultimatum, people started leaving Twitter.
According to the EGT whitepaper, the whole project was made so that it could be driven on the road and transported on a 50-foot semi-trailer. The ideas for the design were sketched and drawn in Los Angeles.
The founders of EGT, who call themselves “Elon Superfans,” said in the project description on their website that they were trying to do “something no other crypto project has dared to do” to get recognition and legitimacy for their project with an acknowledgment from Musk.
But unfortunately for EGT, Musk hasn’t said anything about the $600,000 monument in public, at least on Twitter.
Even so, it got a lot of attention from major news outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and The Washington Post.
There are numerous items with Musk’s name on them.
The only thing we know about EGT and what it’s for is that it was launched on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) in January 2022. According to its own whitepaper, it has been criticized for its Musk-focused marketing plan and lack of utility at launch.
The token is also one of many that are based on Elon Musk and try to use his fame to sell their tokens. Donelon Mars (ELON), SpaceTwitterDoge, and Elon Doge Twitter are also tokens that have something to do with Musk.
At the time this was written, 18,400 people followed EGT on Twitter. Both Coingecko and Coinmarketcap list EGT, but neither has information about its market cap. After the statue was delivered, its price seemed to go up for a short time before going down to its lowest level in a month.
In its whitepaper, EGT says that it is now working on having real use in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space after moving smart contracts from the BSC blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain.
Over the years, crypto projects have often used crazy publicity stunts to get attention.
In 2018, the Ukrainian social network ASKfm started an initial coin offering (ICO) by leaving a wallet with 500,000 tokens on the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain above sea level in the world.
At the time, ASKfm estimated that the tokens in the wallet were worth $50,000, based on what they would be worth after the pre-sale and ICO.
In 2018, Wong Ching-kit, the owner of the website Epoch Cryptocurrency, dropped stacks of cash off a roof in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong, to promote a contest where people could supposedly win a lot of money.
Rahul Advani, APAC Policy Director of Ripple, recently said that crypto will need to move away from “hype cycles” and toward “building real utility.”
Related: Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has eliminated senior management.
He said that the loss of FTX will make regulators and governments look much more closely at how they handle crypto regulations.
