--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Annie Minoff: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 1st.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: A quick warning. This episode discusses suicide. Please take care while listening.
--:-- Annie Minoff: Oh my God. In late February, a man started a live stream on X. He's on his phone. You see him, he's wearing a white t-shirt, he's got gold chains on. And he starts talking to the camera. The man's name? Arnold Harrow. You can see that he's feeling much more anxiety as it's going on. He's, like, scratching his head. Then Harrow holds a bullet up to the camera. Then he puts the bullet into the chamber of Smith & Wesson, and he spins the chamber, and he looks at it. And you could see that he's in a lot of distress. Haro was playing Russian roulette. And then he made a request to his followers. If I die, I hope you guys turn this into a meme coin. Haro killed himself on that livestream. He was 23 years old. And in a matter of hours, his dying request, turn this into a meme coin, came true. Someone created a meme coin that was named after his social media handle. And very quickly, that coin took off. The cryptocurrency named after Haro skyrocketed in value to $2 million.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Our colleague Kevin Dugan covers the culture of finance. He heard about Haru's suicide earlier this year. And it surprised him how easily a tragedy like this could be transformed into an asset.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: There's already this infrastructure that's available that can just take something, take anything, and financialize it. And to me, this felt genuinely new. And it felt like it was something much darker than I had ever really seen before. And that was why I wanted to kind of explore this and see what was actually happening.
--:-- Annie Minoff: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 1st. Coming up on the show, the seedy underbelly of meme coins, where anything is for sale.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Arnold Haro lived in Central California. He worked in the solar industry and had a one-year-old daughter with an ex-girlfriend. Arnold's family described him as a goofball, someone who was very generous, someone who, as recently as Valentine's Day, was sending money to family members who needed it.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: To get a better picture of Haro's life, I spoke to his family and reviewed police records. Haro's sister disputes some of the information in those police records, but declined to get specific.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: A few things from those interviews and records stood out to me. According to police reports, Haro's ex-girlfriend said that he was a part-time drug dealer and user. And according to his family, Haro struggled with depression. So it seemed like he had a little bit of a volatile life. That was offline. But online, on X, Haro's life was also pretty volatile.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: In a bit of a following, I think some of what he was known for was a little bit of his edgy humor. He liked to push buttons and he would do that sometimes by using a lot of language that could include racial slurs and things like that.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: There's one video that went mildly viral in some parts of Twitter where he was spinning around and throwing up and he was called the 360 puke guy. So that was the kind of level of humor that he was involved in.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: On X, Haru often posted about trades he made on the crypto market, particularly meme coins. Meme coins are a fast-growing part of crypto. They first started way back in 2013 with an image of a smiling animated dog.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: So the first meme coin was Dogecoin. And it started off as a joke. The whole project of Doge was a little bit of like, look, you can create something that has no intrinsic value. And instead of becoming worthless and just being something to laugh about online, it actually accumulated a lot of value because it was just a joke.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: You might have bought Doge as a joke, but today the price is no joke. Dogecoin hit a record high. It's now a top 10 cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap of about $40 billion.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And so from there, you start seeing more and more meme coins pop up. By some estimates, meme coins have grown to over $60 billion in value. They've become so mainstream that even President Trump and the First Lady have meme coins. They launched them earlier this year.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Kevin says many traders create and buy meme coins in the hopes of striking it rich fast. Let's say there's a joke on Twitter that, you know, there's some viral cartoon or something that's just going around. And you're early. You see it and you think, you know what? I want to make a meme coin out of this. And you go on a site where you can create it really quickly.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: All of a sudden, all the other people who are kind of in on the joke, they want to get in on it too. Like one that was created in the last few months, it's something called Fartcoin. Okay. Okay. So Fartcoin is, it does not extend much beyond the name. I think I get the concept. Right. Yeah. So, but it has $565 million market cap, as I'm talking right now.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: For a fart. Right. Look, and this is the level of humor that we're talking about here, but it's worth half a billion dollars. And it's, what is it? Well, and presumably, if you were hip to the fart joke early, you could buy your farts and sell them, and maybe you'd have like a nice little bag of change then. Yes, exactly.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Since I talked to Kevin, Fartcoin's market cap has actually grown to over a billion dollars. The coin was created on a particularly popular site in the world of meme coins. Enter PumpFun. PumpFun is a marketplace where people can sell, buy, and make meme coins really quickly.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: It started in 2024. And essentially what it does is it allows you to create cryptocurrencies, meme coins specifically, about as easily as you could create a blog on Tumblr, right? You just click a button, you add a picture, you put in a name, and it doesn't take much more than that.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And all of a sudden, you can start having a cryptocurrency based off an internet joke trading to anybody who wants to buy it. Within seconds? Yeah, just about. Can you show me what this looks like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's the app.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: The first thing you see on PumpFun is a pop-up asking you to certify that you're at least 18 years old before entering the site. Once you're in, the site itself is pretty lo-fi. It has a black background with bright green accents. There are moving GIFs, emojis, and colorful tickers logging new transactions.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And the site is littered with offensive user-generated images and slurs. Like the N-word. It's everywhere. It's like I need to wash my eyeballs now. Yeah, you see a lot of that. I mean, it's incredible just the number. Yes.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: There were thousands of these coins created. Most of them don't really amount to much. But a lot of times you will see a spike because the joke or the meme itself has, you know, it's grabbing attention. And a lot of ways to grab attention is just through, you know, something racist or something extremely objectionable.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: We know Haro spent a lot of time on PumpFun. He hoped to become rich from trading meme coins but wasn't very successful. On his Twitter, he talked about borrowing money from his family in order to buy Trump's meme coins.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And he was hoping to create what he called generational wealth. And it didn't seem like he was doing very well. A lot of what he bought seemed to have lost a lot of value. In January, about a month before the livestream, Harrow lost money on Trump's meme coin.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: On X, he posted, quote, I just bought some Alania too, but knowing my luck, it's probably not going to go anywhere. Harrow also bought a copycat of Trump's coin. That tanked. About a week later, he messaged another trader on X that he'd lost his last $500 on a meme coin supposedly associated with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Haro's dream of getting rich was going nowhere. But soon, other traders would be making money on him. That's next.
--:-- Annie Minoff: Sheriff's Office, do you want to make this here? Can you hold? About an hour after Haro killed himself, his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his daughter, called the police.
--:-- Ex-Girlfriend: Hi, I'm calling. This is my daughter's father. She was just coming off of work. She checked her phone, saw his Twitter account, and then saw that the video was still up at that point. So was he actually, like, did he see a gun, or?
--:-- 911 Operator: Yes, the gun is in the video. The gun went off in the live stream. She didn't know if it was a stunt, and the 911 operator soon sent out police to check on the residents.
--:-- Annie Minoff: So what we know about Arnold's life at that point was that he was under a lot of stress and a lot of financial stress. The reason why we know this is in part from his publicly available crypto wallet, but we also know from police records.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: According to those records, Earlier this year, Haro sold two cars to a Mexican drug dealer. Those cars were stolen, and the drug dealer was very, very unhappy about this and had threatened to kill him.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: So we know that this was happening around the time that he did the livestream. Soon after the livestream, meme coins referencing Haro's suicide proliferated on PumpFun. The most popular coin traded under the ticker Mista, a reference to Haro's X account.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: It also used his profile picture, an image of Haro with his hand over his face. For a short time, Mista was a hit among meme coin traders. It did fit from a certain angle within the culture of this community, right? Because it was extreme and it was obviously very online.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: There were people afterwards who were obviously shocked and horrified by this, but there were also a lot of people who, I mean, they were trading it. You know, there are hundreds, hundreds of people who have bought and sold this coin.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And while again this is a drop in the bucket, you do get a sense that there are a lot of people out there who just have no compunction one way or another about what this means or what kind of effect this can have on this person's family or just somebody else who might be contemplating the same thing.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And do you know if Haro's family has seen any money from these coins? Someone said that they had sent a bunch of the meme coins to Arnold's wallet.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Another person said that they were creating meme coins in order for the family to make some kind of profit or fund their funeral. But soon after I had talked to some family members that did not seem to be the case.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Haro's sister told me that the family had no comment on the events leading up to Haro's death. She said, quote, My brother's death will no longer be anyone's news line or entertainment.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Is PumpFun moderating this site in any way? Like, what have they said about that? The company claims that they do have some filters in place. Again, you were just looking at this. I don't know what those filters exactly are.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: In a statement, a spokesman for Pump Fund said, Mr. Haro's death is a tragedy. Pump had no role in the series of events beyond being the platform on which someone created and launched a crypto token related to the news, clearly in poor taste.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: As for the government, the Securities and Exchange Commission, one agency tasked with regulating crypto, has so far declined to regulate meme coins.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: Six days after Haro's death, the SEC said, quote, meme coins typically are purchased for entertainment, social interaction, and cultural purposes. The SEC hasn't said anything about Haro's death. To the extent that they've talked about meme coins, they say that they are really closer to collectibles, you know, comparing them to something like baseball cards.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And that they are, you know, that they're not funding any kind of company. They're fundamentally different from a stock or a bond. What do you make of that, this distinction between something that's a security and something that's entertainment? Because it feels like it could be a bit squishy.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: It's pretty squishy. This debate has been going on for years and years and years. But the idea here is that if you are raising money through a cryptocurrency sale and that money is being used to fund the operations of a company, then that should count as a security, right?
--:-- Kevin Dugan: When it comes to meme coins, what is this money for? There is no company. There is no project. It's a joke. It's a joke. It's an online joke. So they say meme coins, not our problem. Yes.
--:-- Annie Minoff: After reporting and writing this story, what sticks with you the most? I think what I've taken from this story is that the meme coin markets have had this role here in extending the grief and the pain around the end of Arnold's life.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: So what you're seeing here is that someone who met tragedy, and now you have this coin created by some other person in the world. And now it's part of a casino, right? It's something that you can buy and sell and bet on and have as part of your portfolio.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: I don't know if that is a fluke or if like some people in the crypto world are thinking that this is kind of like how things are going, that this is what the future is going to look like. Really? That you can take any idea, anything, and then turn it into an asset that you can make money off of. And no one can tell you that you can't.
--:-- Kevin Dugan: And you can sell it to anyone in the world, and you can become a millionaire. Right? I think that's what's sticking with me. There's this ambiguity about the future and about the way that we live our lives and how it can be transmuted into some financial-ish token, and that can outlive us.
--:-- Annie Minoff: If you or anyone you know is struggling, you can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 988. That's 988.
--:-- Annie Minoff: That's all for today, Thursday, May 1st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
