STUPID RICH - "The Dumber You Are, the More Money You Make"

[Celerity]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-meme-coin-evangelists

https://archive.ph/DMjTb



On a recent afternoon in otherwise sleepy Bel Air, where multimillion-dollar mansions disappear behind walls of tangled bougainvillea, two security guards, handguns at their hips, pace before a tall black gate, keeping watch over a cutting-edge social experiment: the marriage of influencer culture and meme coin speculation. Inside, caterers pass out coconuts to Love Island cast members who lounge in glittering bikinis, prepping to film sponsored content. Everyone is beautiful, bronzed, and carefully composed for the camera. At the head of a long table sits Jade Watson, a redheaded content producer, drafting a prediction- markets-for-dummies campaign based on the long-term romantic prospects of the reality show’s couples: Buy, hold, or sell?



“What we’re doing is simplifying trading terms,” Watson says. “But we’re using the language Gen Z already speaks.” Downstairs, in a room of wall-to-wall windows overlooking dusty canyons sloping out to the Los Angeles skyline, four traders sit before massive monitors. The screens are filled with charts and numbers. It looks like a tiny Wall Street trading floor with a patio bar and infinity pool attached. Webcams are fixed on the traders, livestreaming to an invisible online audience. There’s a DJ. Welcome to Meme House LA.



While the reality stars upstairs possess the hyperreal beauty bestowed by an Instagram filter, these traders look like regular people. But they, too, are participants in a reality show: a 24/7 livestream about themselves—the meme coin traders live in a mansion that reportedly sold two years back for some $18 million. The goal of the project is to turn each of these traders into what is called a KOL, or key opinion leader: an influencer who moves markets. One of the most famous KOLs was Roaring Kitty, the red-headband-wearing YouTuber who made millions rallying his followers, like Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets, to invest in Gamestop. “What I want,” says Roman Hossain, the project’s elusive founder, surveying the scene, “is to create eight Roaring Kitties.”



Hossain is dressed in the costume of California comfort: bare feet peeking out beneath white jeans, a tan polo spun from natural-looking fiber, and, on his wrist, a Rolex. Hossain says he made his fortune in crypto currencies like Bitcoin. Out in the driveway sit two Lamborghinis, a Ferrari F8 Tributo, and a Rolls-Royce. “Everyone always says, ‘I wish I got into Bitcoin back in the day when everyone was making money,’ ” states Hossain. “But with meme coins, we see those kinds of returns every single week.” Meme House LA and its occupants represent one of the stranger phenomena of the postpandemic internet: the emergence of a financial ecosystem cobbled together from Telegram group chats, Discord channels, and Twitter DMs—where millions are made and lost by people who in a previous era would have had little access to or interest in the markets. It is all centered on an asset that has no clear function or utility. But it is powered by the most valuable tender on the planet: attention.

snip