Elon Musk’s dad is promoting a memecoin that capitalizes on the family name to raise upto $200 million for various engineering projects, despite the father-son duo apparently being estranged.
Errol Musk, alongside business partner Nathan Browne, will officially back the “MUSK IT” token with the ambitious goal of establishing the Musk Institute, a new for-profit think tank that Errol aims to spearhead, per Fortune.
The Musk Institute plans to “go beyond rockets” and build flying vehicles and other scientific pursuits. It is unclear how Elon Musk will be involved in this, if at all.
“I’m the head of the family. It really started with me in our family—I’ve been ‘Musking It’ for years,” he told Fortune, dismissing any concerns about leveraging his surname for this project.
The Musk Institute plans to collaborate with nobility in the UAE to foster innovative engineering projects, though specifics on timelines or project details are still forthcoming.
A Middle East-based crypto company initially launched the token in December. Errol and Browne were later onboarded and attached themselves after conceiving the idea for the Musk Institute.
MUSK IT boasts a $25 million market capitalization as of Friday, CoinMarketCap data shows, with $79 million in trading volumes and a 130% price rise in the past 24 hours. The token was issued on Solana platform Pump.fun, its contract address shows, with one billion tokens in circulation.
Token data shows 44,000 MUSK IT holders and the top ten addresses hold over 20% of the token’s total supply — cumulatively worth over $7 million at current prices.
It zoomed from 1 cent to 20 cents shortly after Fortune’s publication on the low liquidity and muted trading volumes and is back to just over 2 cents during Asian afternoon hours.
However, the specifics of how “Musk It” will operate, particularly its “tokenomics,” remain shrouded in mystery. Neither Errol Musk, Browne nor the Musk It website provided detailed insights into the token’s structure or distribution plans.
Errol’s promotion is the latest in a long list of so-termed celebrity tokens, or typically short-lived memecoins that ride the hype of a known personality before eventually dying out.
As such, one of the conditions laid out by Errol and Browne before the partnership was that the MUSKIT token “cannot be a pump and dump.”
But despite the distance from Elon Musk’s projects, the Musk It site prominently features several of his innovations — from a SpaceX rocket to a Tesla Cybertruck with only a “Mars Base; Opening Soon” note on the homepage.