In the wake of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump’s recent official token launches, Elon Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is the latest to jump on the memecoin bandwagon.
In an interview with Fortune, Errol Musk and his business partner, tech consultant Nathan Browne, said they hoped to raise between $150 million and $200 million from a memecoin project called “Musk It.”
Errol Musk, who reportedly has a strained relationship with his billionaire son and other family members, is the son of a military cryptographer who studied electromechanics before working as an engineer and property developer, building office spaces and retail centers. He also pursued a career in politics, serving on Pretoria’s city council, and acquired rights to emerald mines in Zambia.
“I’m the head of the family,” Errol Musk told Fortune. “It really started with me in our family—I’ve been ‘Musking It’ for years,” he said, adding that he intends to use the proceeds to fund the Musk Institute, a new for-profit think tank he is establishing to pursue his own scientific interests, including flying vehicles.
However, Errol Musk and Browne did not create the Musk It coin, which was quietly launched by a Middle Eastern-based crypto company in December, the outlet reported. Instead, Errol Musk explained that they approved the name and chose to collaborate on the token after conceiving the idea for the Musk Institute late last year.
Errol Musk told Fortune he is now prepared to publicly endorse the Solana-based, Pump.fun launched MUSKIT token. However, there remains very little public information about the project’s tokenomics, aside from its 1 billion total and circulating supply, and he seemed somewhat in the dark on the details too. Meanwhile, Browne reportedly said that a condition for joining the project was that “this cannot be a pump and dump.”
The MUSKIT token had persistently fallen in value since its launch on Dec. 9 but skyrocketed from $0.01 to $0.07 following Errol Musk’s endorsement on Thursday before retracing. The memecoin is currently trading for $0.035, according to CoinGecko, with a market cap of $35 million.
MUSKIT/USD price chart. Image: CoinGecko.
While Errol Musk claimed he had recently spoken to his famous son about the project earlier this month, he emphasized Elon Musk had nothing to do with it. However, the project’s website heavily draws on Elon Musk’s endeavors, depicting a Mars base scene with a SpaceX rocket and Tesla Cybertruck, simply adding that the “Mars Musk It base” is “opening soon.”
As for Elon Musk, while he has been a long-time advocate for the largest memecoin, Doge, and many third parties have created tokens using his name, he has not launched an official token of his own.
“I make Dogecoin jokes and stuff because I just kind of like Dogecoin,” Musk said last year. “Because it’s got the best sense of humor, and it has dogs and memes, and I love all those things.” DOGE is currently trading for $0.33 at a market cap of $48.4 billion, according to The Block’s Dogecoin Price Page.
Elon Musk, who already runs Tesla, SpaceX and X, recently took charge of President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), designed to streamline federal operations and slash spending costs.
The high-profile and controversial launch of Trump’s official Solana-based memecoin came during the premiere Crypto Ball in Washington on the Friday night before his inauguration as President.
A frenzy of trading activity subsequently lifted the TRUMP token to a fully diluted valuation of more than $75 billion at one point, briefly surpassing DOGE.
That was until the launch of returning First Lady Melania Trump's own memecoin, MELANIA, saw a 50% correction for the TRUMP token. Melania's memecoin hit a peak fully diluted valuation of around $13 billion before it also swiftly collapsed in price.
TRUMP is currently trading for $25.77 at a market cap of $5.1 billion, and MELANIA is changing hands for $2.06 at a $308 million market cap, per The Block’s Prices Page.
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