Professional Democratic nepobaby Hunter Biden has launched a meme coin trading under the ticker $LAPTOP and framed it as a way to troll President Donald Trump and show that “truth matters.” His pitch is nonsense. Biden’s meme coin is, just like all other meme coins, essentially a scam that exploits naive consumer behavior. And it confirms my suspicion that his over-the-top, attention-seeking media blitz this summer served as an expedient way to try to find new cash flows.
The name of Biden’s meme coin, which debuted on Wednesday, is a reference to how his laptop became a subject of widespread scrutiny in the run-up to the 2020 election after it was discovered in a computer repair shop in Delaware. Biden’s decision to name his meme coin after that notorious computer — which was a thorn in the side of both his father’s 2020 campaign and his presidency — underscores how Biden’s new media brand is all about owning the things that have humiliated him in years past. Now, it looks like he’s angling to profit off them.
The most obvious way for Biden to draw more attention to the meme coin is drawing more attention to himself.
Meme coins don’t have any innate value — they derive value from the level of demand for them and expectation of their future value. As The Wall Street Journal explained, “Meme coins began as a joke — a way for a burgeoning crypto industry to make light of their own willingness to buy anything digital no matter how questionable they appeared.” They are a natural extension of today’s attention economy, offering the theoretical opportunity to make money for their holders purely off buzz, including ironic buzz. Many public figures and celebrities, including Trump, have launched meme coins, which have surged — and then crashed and burned.
Biden has tried to sell his meme coin as a wholesome alternative to the average meme coin — and a way to participate in anti-MAGA activism. He has said he’s sending 20% of his meme coins to people who lost money on Trump’s meme coin, and another 30% will be destroyed if a series of possible events, such as Democrats winning the 2028 election, were to occur. This would create scarcity, boosting the meme coins’ value. If those events don’t happen, they will be donated to charity, Biden has said.
But none of those features change the fact that it’s still a meme coin — a purely speculative asset that is all but destined to be useless for its investors. The usual trajectory is already emerging — Bloomberg reported that as soon as $LAPTOP launched on Wednesday, “the coin surged from around $3 to more than $300 in a matter of seconds, before giving back most of those gains minutes later,” and then later on was trading at $2.60.
Biden, seemingly trying to put on an air of integrity, wrote on X, “You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you.”
But of course, that’s the entire purpose behind putting money into an asset. And Biden has a financial incentive to try to inflate its value. The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said that $LAPTOP’s founders, including Biden, hold 30% of the tokens. In a recent interview with right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, Biden said, “I really believe in crypto currency … but I also want to make some money.”
The most obvious way for Biden to draw more attention to the meme coin is drawing more attention to himself. One potential lane is already foreseeable: melding the irony of his new personal brand — in which he constantly tries to go viral on social media, makes light of his past addiction to crack cocaine and prompts reporters to ask Trump whether Biden should run for president — with the irony of trading $LAPTOP. That gives him every incentive to throw himself even further into his dime store political punditry and arranging more conversations with conspiratorial extremists like podcaster Candace Owens, white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes and Carlson. These media hits have been clearly designed to “break the internet” and attract controversy, which render the extremism of his right-wing interlocutors innocuous and normal, whether intentionally or not.
Biden has attempted to market his meme coin as a political statement and a lifestyle: “$LAPTOP isn’t just about owning something, it’s about saying something.” But what it says about the man behind it isn’t flattering.
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