According to a recently published piece by Patty360, Billy Markus who created Dogecoin in cooperation with Jackson Palmer in 2013 as a parody on Bitcoin, faced big financial losses after the DOGE price fell from its historic peak in 2021. 

Billy Markus is known on Twitter under the alias Shibetoshi Nakamoto and has 2 million followers. Palmer has 44,200 subscribers and he is much less active on Twitter than Markus.

Dogecoin plunge steals millions from Markus

Dogecoin had reached a large level of popularity on Twitter and other social media platforms by May 2021, largely thanks to Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, and several other innovative companies.

Back, then Musk was giving massive support to DOGE by tweeting about this meme token. He called Dogecoin the “currency of the people” and then called himself “The DogeFather”.

The tweet that mocked the iconic movie by Francis Ford Coppola was posted right before Musk made a debut on the Saturday Night Live (SNL) show. That pushed the price of the meme crypto to the all-time high of $0.7376. The price surge took place on May 9, 2021.

At that moment, according to the aforementioned article, the net worth of Billy Markus soared to $20 million in DOGE. However, the enormous price rise was followed by a deep fall. At the start of 2022, DOGE was added by Tesla and then by SpaceX as a payment option. However, that failed to push the meme coin’s price up as high as Musk’s TV debut.

Currently, Dogecoin is changing hands at the $0.07262 level. This is more than 90 percent below the latest historic peak. By 2022, this plunge in price made the fortune of Markus shrink from $20 million to $1 million. 

“Markus’ net worth was estimated to be around $20 million. However, as Dogecoin’s value declined in the following months, so did Markus’ net worth. As of 2022, Markus’ net worth is estimated to be around $1 million.” 🤣

You are still rich Billy 😅❤️https://t.co/ghjPMDNQ9Q

— inevitable360 (@inevitable360) March 8, 2023

Markus sells Ethereum to pay taxes

According to several tweets published by the second Doge co-founder last year, he mostly stopped investing in crypto in 2013 as he thought it was merely gambling. He sold a big part of his crypto in 2015 for $10,000. After that, he kept some of his crypto, at least that is certain for Ethereum.

In mid-January, Markus tweeted that he had to some of his Ethereum at $1,190 per coin in order to pay his taxes for 2022.

Several times, Markus has mentioned that he has a job and he likes it – that was his response to a question why he does not want to apply for a job at Twitter after his social media pal Elon Musk took over the company. According to this source, as of 2022, the net worth of Palmer could be close to that of Markus now – between $5 million and $1 million.