Hunter Biden’s latest venture didn’t exactly go according to plan. The president’s son launched a new meme coin Wednesday poking fun at his own infamous laptop scandal — and it collapsed almost instantly, plunging 95 percent within hours of hitting the market.
The coin, dubbed $LAPTOP, opened trading at $37.26 before rocketing sixfold to $222.75 within just five minutes, according to data from CoinMarketCap. But the surge was short-lived. By around 11 a.m. Eastern, the coin had crashed all the way down to a mere $1.86.
The coin was a not-so-subtle jab at what has been dubbed Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell,” the device first reported on by the New York Post in October 2020 and swiftly censored by Twitter at the time. According to the Wall Street Journal, 20 percent of the coin’s total supply was set to be distributed, in two batches, to crypto wallets belonging to people who lost money on President Trump’s own meme coin, subscribers to Hunter Biden’s Substack, and a mailing list curated by video journalist Andrew Callaghan. Biden and other insiders reportedly held 30 percent of the coins issued.
The crash puts Biden’s coin in rough company. President Trump’s own meme coin is currently down 97 percent from its all-time high of $75.35. First Lady Melania Trump’s coin has fared even worse, down 99 percent from its peak. Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ coin isn’t far behind, down 87 percent from its high.
Even before the launch, CNN senior business reporter Matt Egan tried to warn viewers away from the venture, relaying comments from a Wall Street executive who called meme coins “amusing” but ultimately a “really stupid” investment.
That prediction appears to have been right on the money. Whatever novelty value the $LAPTOP coin carried evaporated almost as fast as it appeared, joining a growing graveyard of political meme coins that burned early investors while insiders and namesakes walked away relatively unscathed. For a family already synonymous with controversy over the very laptop the coin was named after, the crash is just the latest embarrassing headline.
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