Billy Markus was a software engineer at IBM in Portland when he saw Jackson Palmer’s Dogecoin joke tweet. Markus had been trying to create his own cryptocurrency to learn how blockchains worked. He reached out to Palmer, suggested they collaborate, and over a weekend forked the Litecoin codebase to create the first working version of Dogecoin.
Markus later left the project in 2015 and famously sold all his Doge for around $500 — enough to buy a used Honda Civic. When Doge hit its all-time high in 2021, those same coins would have been worth tens of millions of dollars. Markus took it with grace. Today he is active on Twitter as @BillyM2k, frequently joking about the absurdity of the asset he co-created and Elon Musk’s ongoing relationship with it.
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