Bizarre $600K Elon Musk crypto statue marketing stunt falls flat

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has seemingly given the cold shoulder to a $600,000 monument of him in goat form —  which was created as part of a bizarre crypto marketing stunt.

Delivered to Tesla’s Austin headquarters on Nov. 26, the 30-foot, 12,000-pound metal statue of Elon Musk was part of a publicity stunt by the co-founders of the memecoin Elon Goat Token (EGT).

The statue features the head of Elon Musk on the body of a goat that is riding a rocket. The statue also sees Musk wearing a dog collar with a Dogecoin (DOGE) token attached.

We’re very proud of our accomplishments and commitment to #EGT

We’ve always had long term vision for $EGT and will continue to build the brand and utility.

We feel our hard work can lead to Elon claiming #ElonGOAT and we will work towards this goal! Maybe have some fun too! pic.twitter.com/Rk2Gdn5PpE

— Elon Goat Token (@ElonGoatToken) November 27, 2022

According to the EGT white paper, the whole project was engineered to be roadworthy and fastened to a 50-foot semi-trailer for transportation. The conceptual design was drawn and rendered in Los Angeles.

The founders of EGT, who are self-described “Elon Superfans,” said in the project description on their website they were trying to do “something no other Crypto project has dared to do” to gain recognition and legitimacy for their project with an acknowledgment from Musk.

Unfortunately for EGT, however, the $600,000 monument has failed to gain any public acknowledgment from Musk himself, at least on Twitter. 

Despite this, it still got plenty of mainstream media coverage, including from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider and The Washington Post.

Plenty of Musk-themed tokens 

There isn’t much information about EGT and its purpose other than it was launched in Jan. 2022 on the BNB Smart Chain and has been criticized for its Musk-centric marketing plan and lack of utility featured upon launch, according to its own white paper. 

The token is also one of many Elon Musk-themed tokens attempting to exploit the entrepreneur’s fame to market its token. Other Musk-themed tokens include Dogelon Mars (ELON) and spaceTwitterDoge and elonDogeTwit.

As of the time of writing, EGT has 18,400 followers on Twitter, while CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both list EGT, but neither has data surrounding its market cap. Its price appeared to have spiked momentarily before dipping to month lows after the delivery of the statue.

According to its white paper, EGT claims to now be working on having real utility in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, having migrated smart contracts from BNB Smart Chain to the Ethereum blockchain.

Related: It’s time for crypto fans to stop supporting cults of personality

Over-the-top publicity stunts have been a popular method for crypto projects over the years.

In 2018, Ukrainian social network ASKfm launched an initial coin offering (ICO) by leaving a wallet with 500,000 tokens at the top of Mount Everest, the highest mountain above sea level in the world.

At the time, ASKfm calculated the tokens in the wallet at $50,000, a sum calculated by an estimate of their value once the pre-sale and ICO launch.

Another stunt in 2018 saw the owner of the Epoch Cryptocurrency website Wong Ching-kit drop stacks of cash off a roof in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong, to promote a competition where participants could allegedly win large cash prizes.

Most recently, Rahul Advani, APAC policy director of Ripple argued that crypto will need to move away from “hype cycles” and toward “building real utility.”

He explained that the fall of FTX will prompt regulators and governments to scrutinize crypto regulations much more closely.