- A Dogecoin investor says his $180,000 investment led him to become a millionaire.
- He said Elon Musk was the key reason he piled his savings into the meme currency.
- Glauber Contessoto, of Los Angeles, posted a screenshot of his Robinhood balance on Reddit.
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Glauber Contessoto, a 33-year-old Los Angeles resident, claims to have become a Dogecoin millionaire on April 15.
He said he invested over $180,000 into Dogecoin when its price was about $0.045 cents, on February 5. He detailed his reasons for buying the meme currency in a YouTube video and posted on the Dogecoin subreddit two months later about his new millionaire status.
“Hey guys I just became a Dogecoin millionaire,” he wrote, attaching a screenshot of his holdings on Robinhood.
Insider could not independently verify Contessoto’s Dogecoin holdings.
u/iUsedToCallDogeDodge/Reddit
Contessoto, who works in the music business, said the billionaire Elon Musk was a key inspiration behind his decision. He claimed in his YouTube video that the Tesla boss owned about a third of the Dogecoins in circulation.
Retail investors have pumped up Dogecoin’s price this year, taking their cue from Musk’s tweets describing it as “the people’s crypto.” It’s unclear whether his tweets were in jest or whether he was being serious.
@elonmusk/Twitter
“I think the guy is a genius,” Contessoto said of Musk in a CNBC interview last week. He said that he strongly believed in Dogecoin’s potential and that it could help him build wealth to pass on to his family.
Contessoto told CNBC that he grew up poor and that his gain from the meme currency was a “huge deal” for him. He said that he took a huge risk to buy Dogecoin by using all his savings and sales from his shares of Tesla and Uber and that he invested on margin from Robinhood.
He said that he stuck to his plans despite warnings from friends and that he’d decided to take out 10% of his holdings once he hit $10 million.
Dogecoin surged by 8,000% last week, trading near $0.42. It was trading at $0.28 on Monday, with a market cap of about $36 billion.
Several experts recently told Insider why they thought the meme asset had been surging in popularity. “Bitcoin is for the wealthy, Ethereum for the middle class, and Dogecoin is for the people,” one said.
Despite the slide in Dogecoin’s value, Contessoto said his investment was still worth just over $1 million.
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