The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin

Summary

Planet Money: The Parable of Peanut the Memecoin

Hosted by NPR's Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Nick Nevis | Released on March 5, 2025

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1. Introduction: The Unexpected Raid

The episode opens with a gripping account from Mark Longo, a dedicated animal rescuer whose life takes an unexpected turn. On the morning of October 30, 2024, while tending to his animal sanctuary in upstate New York, Mark witnesses a government raid led by officers from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

Mark Longo [01:06]: "Department of Environmental Conservation."

The officers arrive not to arrest Mark, but to seize his pet squirrel, Peanut, citing illegal wildlife ownership without the necessary permits. The situation escalates quickly, culminating in the unfortunate euthanization of Peanut and a raccoon named Fred after Peanut bites an officer.

Mark Longo [02:27]: "Until finally I was midway on the staircase. I had three cops to my right, I had three to my left. And one of them yelled, I found Peanut. I found the squirrel."

2. Peanut's Rise to Fame

Before the raid, Peanut had already become a social media sensation. Through Instagram and TikTok, Peanut amassed over a million followers, becoming one of the most beloved animal influencers.

Mark Longo [04:02]: "I met my wife because of Peanut."

Mark leveraged Peanut's popularity to create an empire that included merchandising and partnerships with brands like Cameo. This not only provided financial support for his sanctuary but also intertwined Peanut's story with Mark's personal life, leading to serendipitous events such as meeting his wife through Peanut's online presence.

3. Monetizing Viral Fame

The podcast delves into the intricacies of the modern attention economy, where social media platforms enable anyone—or any creature—to achieve rapid fame. Peanut's viral success opened doors to various monetization avenues.

Cameo Partnership

Cameo, a platform allowing celebrities to offer personalized shout-outs, approached Mark to feature Peanut. This collaboration included dressing Peanut in costumes and creating custom messages for fans.

Mark Longo [14:48]: "The coolest part about it was they were classifying Peanut as the same as, like, a lot of the celebrities that you see in movies."

OnlyFans Venture

Seeking additional revenue streams, Mark and his wife ventured into OnlyFans, a platform predominantly known for adult content. Surprisingly, their wholesome association with Peanut provided a unique twist, attracting thousands of subscribers within minutes of launching.

Mark Longo [19:07]: "Within minutes, literally. We launched it at like 10 o'clock in the morning and within the first 20 minutes I had a couple thousand subscribers."

Through strategic pricing and personalized content, Mark and his wife generated over $10,000 a month, which was crucial for maintaining their growing sanctuary hosting over 300 animals.

4. Tragedy Strikes and Viral Outrage

The untimely death of Peanut triggered a massive wave of media attention and public outrage. Mark found himself at the center of a viral storm, receiving messages from high-profile figures expressing condolences and outrage.

Mark Longo [22:53]: "I have Quentin Tarantino in my DMs. I have my favorite bands reaching out, going, what can we do to help?"

However, the loss also exposed the fragility of relying solely on viral fame for financial sustainability. Without Peanut, the primary source of attention—and income—was abruptly cut off, leaving Mark grappling with the sustainability of his sanctuary.

5. The Meme Coin Phenomenon

In the wake of Peanut's death, an anonymous group in the cryptocurrency sphere transformed Peanut's image into a meme coin titled "Peanut Coin" with the ticker symbol "P.N.U.T."

Mark Longo [24:34]: "It's at 2 billion. Are you involved in this? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Peanut Coin rapidly surged to a market cap of over $2 billion, turning Peanut's legacy into a digital asset. This development introduced Mark to the volatile world of meme coins—a new frontier where viral moments translate into speculative financial instruments.

Market Dynamics and Challenges

Mark's limited understanding of cryptocurrency became a hurdle as he discovered that significant profits from Peanut Coin were accruing to anonymous traders, not supporting his sanctuary. Attempts to engage with the meme coin market led to further complications, including accusations of market manipulation and reputational damage.

Mark Longo [28:04]: "Peanut's viral popularity had been leveraged by a group of anonymous crypto insiders into ludicrous amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars."

6. Legal Battles and Seeking Justice

Determined to reclaim control over Peanut's legacy, Mark initiated legal actions against major crypto exchanges, alleging copyright and trademark violations due to the unauthorized use of his and Peanut's likeness.

Mark Longo [34:02]: "You go on their website, it literally has a photo of me with Peanut. They use this to base their whole project on my story."

Despite the anonymity of meme coin creators, Mark's legal strategy aimed to challenge the broader infrastructure supporting such cryptocurrencies, potentially setting precedents for intellectual property rights in the digital age.

7. Reflections on the Attention Economy

Throughout the episode, Mark reflects on the impermanence and fickleness of viral fame. His journey underscores the complexities of the attention economy, where fleeting moments can have profound and lasting impacts on individuals' lives.

Mark Longo [35:22]: "I never thought I'd be somebody who has to fight trauma like I'm about. I have to focus that anger into motivation and positivity because if I don't, I'm going to just mentally break down myself."

Mark's resilience and adaptation in the face of adversity highlight both the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in the modern digital landscape.

8. Conclusion: The Legacy of Peanut

As the episode wraps up, Mark continues to navigate the challenges of sustaining his sanctuary without Peanut's guiding influence. He remains hopeful that his legal efforts will yield positive outcomes, allowing him to honor Peanut's memory while ensuring the well-being of his other rescued animals.

Mark Longo [35:46]: "We're hanging on by a thread."

The story of Peanut the Memecoin serves as a poignant parable about the intersection of viral fame, digital economies, and personal resilience in an ever-evolving attention-driven world.

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Notable Quotes:

• Mark Longo [02:27]: "Until finally I was midway on the staircase. I had three cops to my right, I had three to my left. And one of them yelled, I found Peanut. I found the squirrel."

• Mark Longo [04:02]: "I met my wife because of Peanut."

• Mark Longo [14:48]: "The coolest part about it was they were classifying Peanut as the same as, like, a lot of the celebrities that you see in movies."

• Mark Longo [19:07]: "Within minutes, literally. We launched it at like 10 o'clock in the morning and within the first 20 minutes I had a couple thousand subscribers."

• Mark Longo [24:34]: "It's at 2 billion. Are you involved in this? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about."

• Mark Longo [34:02]: "You go on their website, it literally has a photo of me with Peanut. They use this to base their whole project on my story."

• Mark Longo [35:22]: "I never thought I'd be somebody who has to fight trauma like I'm about. I have to focus that anger into motivation and positivity because if I don't, I'm going to just mentally break down myself."

• Mark Longo [35:46]: "We're hanging on by a thread."

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Episode Credits:

Produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Executive Producer: Alex Goldmark.

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For insights into the explosive rise of meme coins and their impact on the financial landscape, listen to Planet Money's recent episode, "The Meme Coin Casino."

Transcript

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

This episode talks about sex and sex work. It's an economic show, after all.

[Nick Nevis]

This is planet money from NPR.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

On the morning of October 30, 2024, Mark Longo was doing what he does most mornings. He was at his animal sanctuary on a farm in upstate New York, feeding the several hundred horses and goats and pygmy donkeys he's rescued, many of which he and his wife have saved from the slaughterhouse. So where were you when the raid began?

[Mark Longo]

So I was at the end of the driveway in the beginning, that is.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

When Mark saw something strange and menacing approaching the property. A convoy of SUVs with New York State government decals on the door. They're from an agency called the dec. What does DEC stand for?

[Mark Longo]

Department of Environmental Conservation.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

One of these Department of Environmental Conservation officers gets out of the car and tells Mark they'd come to his farm in order to take somebody into custody. And then he produced a search warrant. But the warrant wasn't for Mark or his wife or any of the people on the farm. The warrant was for a squirrel named Peanut.

[Mark Longo]

And I remember I got a call off to my wife to say, they're here. Hide the animals. And I tried to buy myself some time to maybe figure out what's going on here.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

What was going on here was that Mark's pet squirrel, Peanut, had become one of the most famous squirrels in the world. Thanks to social media, Peanut had reached the status of animal influencer. It over a million followers on Instagram and TikTok. But as the DEC officers reminded Mark, it is illegal in the state of New York to keep wildlife as a pet without a special permit, a permit that Mark did not have. The DEC said they'd received several complaints. And based on dozens of extremely popular and frankly, quite adorable videos on Peanut's social media page, the officers had determined that both Peanut and a relatively newly acquired raccoon named Fred were somewhere on the premises. Over the next several hours, DEC officers made Mark and his wife stand by as they scoured the property in search of Mark's celebrity squirrel.

[Mark Longo]

Until finally I was midway on the staircase. I had three cops to my right, I had three to my left. And one of them yelled, I found Peanut. I found the squirrel. And I said, listen, guys, like I'll take Peanut. I apologize. I'll put him in the car and I'll drive him to Connecticut. You'll never see him again. And the guy to my right, I'll never forget this to the day I die. He looked at me dead in my eyes and said, it was a scroll. Now it's a raccoon. When is this snowball effect going to stop?

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

The DEC officers did not let Mark take Peanut out of state. Instead, they took Peanut and Fred into custody. And after a few days of waiting and wondering where they'd been taken, a local news reporter calls Mark with some unsettling news.

[Mark Longo]

Day three comes around. I get a phone call from our local news station from a gentleman who's in tears, and he's like, mark, I don't know how to tell you, but they're gone.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

We reached out to the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, but they didn't get back to us. According to a statement from the department, Peanut had bitten someone involved with the investigation. And as part of a protocol to test whether Peanut or Fred had rabies, both of them had been euthanized.

[Mark Longo]

And I remember just, like, feeling nothing, not even anger, like nothing. Just sitting there as a shell of a human being, not really believing it, because, what. This is a movie story, right? This is. This is just straight out of a, you know, a film. And I found out, and I remember hanging up the phone, and there was a couple volunteers there, and I said, they killed them. And they started to cry, and I walked away.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark takes to social media to tell the world what had happened. And pretty soon, the story goes absolutely viral.

[Mark Longo]

My phone started buzzing. TMZ's calling. You know, every major news outlets wants this story. And that's when it just went nuts. And then you. You're hearing Elon Musk talk about it, and you're hearing, you know, J.D. vance and now Trump Jr. And it turned into, like, a political stunt. Our government will let in 600,000 criminals across our border, but if someone has a pet squirrel without a permit, they go in there and kill the squirrel. That's the Democrat Party. But it also turned into one of the biggest tragedies in 2024. You know, I. My squirrel sits next to Harambe now. And I always tell people like, this shouldn't have been a story.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Did you ever imagine that Peanut might find an afterlife on the blockchain?

[Sponsor Voice]

No.

[Mark Longo]

I didn't even know what the blockchain was. Hadn't a clue.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

But you would find out.

[Mark Longo]

I would, yeah. I would soon find out.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz. Ghazi. You can think of the story of Peanut the squirrel as a kind of modern parable. A tale about how a chance encounter can change your life, bring you fame and fortune, but also how that attention can spin wildly out of your control. Today on the show, how an anonymous baby rodent rose to become a world famous animal influencer, then a political martyr and finally a piece of cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars. Joining the ranks of Dogecoin, Haktua and President Donald Trump. And what all of this says about the brave new kind of terrifying attention economy we are all living in. It's one of the bushiest tales we've ever told.

[Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[NPR Sponsor Voice]

This message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less and all plans include high speed data, unlimited talk and text and nationwide coverage. See for [e-mail] Switch this message comes from Charles Schwab. When it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices like full service, wealth management and advice when you need it. You can also invest on your own and trade on thinkorswim. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

About a month ago, freelance reporter Nick Nevis and I took a trip to Peanut's Freedom Farm in upstate New York. We were there to visit Mark Longo and see the tiny empire that his celebrity squirrel's fame helped build. The house that Peanut built.

[Nick Nevis]

And in order to learn how Peanut's story began, Mark brought us to a special room that he's turned into a kind of memorial for his fallen friend.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Wow.

[Mark Longo]

So.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

The inner sanctum.

[Mark Longo]

This is Peanut's room.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

The room is filled with Peanut memorabilia sent in by fans around the world. The walls and ceilings are covered in newspaper clippings and drawings. And under glass, the piece de resistance. A tiny squirrel sized like 1oz cowboy hat.

[Mark Longo]

The most iconic piece is it here. And it is your. Your cowboy hat.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Now the story of how this one squirrel rose from an anonymous street rodent to a World famous animal influencer begins seven years ago on a sunny spring day in midtown Manhattan.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark Longo was 27 back then, working as a building inspector on construction sites around New York, when he comes across the body of a squirrel that had just been flattened by a car. And when he looks a little closer, he sees there's a tiny infant squirrel next to her.

[Mark Longo]

And now I'm seeing this baby squirrel walk in the middle of the street, and he's looking at me. He's only got one eye open, and then he just made one hop and was down on my pant leg and just started to crawl up my leg. So as he got closer, I kind of, like, brought him up into my hands and I put him in my hoodie.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark is a lifelong animal lover. Doesn't want the squirrel to die, so he brings it home and starts trying to figure out how to nurse it back to health. The. The little guy seems to love peanuts at first, so that is what Mark names him. But pretty soon, Peanut reveals himself to be a pretty picky eater.

[Mark Longo]

The only way I can get him to eat was through, you know, mashing up an avocado in the powder, and he would just stuff his face into it.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Classic Millennial.

[Mark Longo]

Yeah, literally, like avocado toast. It was 100% his menu the whole time.

[Nick Nevis]

And as Peanut begins to grow, Mark starts to fold him more and more into his daily life.

[Mark Longo]

You know, I played video games. He's in my pocket. You know, I went to go to cvs, he's in my hoodie. You know, we. I remember bringing him to petsmart and put him in one of the hamster balls, and he's running down the hall, and the woman's like, oh, what do you have in there, a gerbil? And I was like, yeah, sure, it's a gerbil. You know, and there's Peanut running around this little baby squirrel, you know, and then we just started to, you know, take photos and videos of him.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark decides to start an Instagram account for Peanut. He starts posting videos of Peanut wearing little costumes like that cowboy hat or a miniature Rangers jersey, and.

[Mark Longo]

And a large majority of the time, it was absolute gold.

[Nick Nevis]

Peanut befriends Mark's cat, which people seem to love. And slowly but surely, Peanut's social media following starts to grow.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

When did you first get the sense you might have a viral social media star on your hands?

[Mark Longo]

It kind of just happened.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark says there was one video in particular that seemed to light up the Internet. One where Peanut jumps from the top of the Fridge and into Mark's hand in slow motion.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And this is where the story of Peanut the squirrel meets the modern attention economy. And the central question it raises, when you have the world's attention, how do you actually turn that into money? For a long time, attention, this scarce resource was monopolized by newspapers and TV or radio companies who used the power of celebrity or news or scandal to draw in as many eyeballs as possible in order to sell ads.

[Nick Nevis]

But over the last couple decades, social media platforms have tweaked that model by essentially allowing anyone to be a miniature broadcaster. Now, someone or some creature can go from total anonymity to worldwide fame in just a couple hours.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Which is exactly what happened when Peanut's first viral video popped off. After that, a popular animal video website called the dodo posted a video featuring Mark and Peanut.

[Mark Longo]

Then the messages started rolling in.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark started getting calls from radio stations and TV shows from around the world.

[Mark Longo]

We went on British TV and they deemed him the world's most famous squirrel. And that's when his TikTok blew up. And that's where, you know, 100,000 followers became a few million. And we just kind of rolled with the wave.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark says Peanut warmed to this newfound limelight right away. He was just a preternaturally charismatic mini fauna, especially when the cameras were rolling.

[Mark Longo]

I fist pumped that scroll so many damn times because he just nailed these interviews like it was something that he was meant to do.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Peanut knew how to turn on the charm.

[Mark Longo]

Did he ever, you know, especially with ladies, like, he was a ladies man.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark says his male friends would regularly post photos with Peanut on their online dating profiles to great success. And for Mark himself, Peanut turned out to be the ultimate wingman.

[Mark Longo]

I met my wife because of Peanut.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

No way.

[Mark Longo]

My wife dmed me on Peanut's page, and that's how we met. She ended up calling me wearing a flying squirrel costume.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Wow.

[Mark Longo]

And I was like, I think I'm in love with you now.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

When it came to monetizing all this newfound attention, Mark says he never set out to make money off his tiny, furry best friend. But as Peanut's profile grew in the attention economy of social media, all sorts of strange new opportunities started to present themselves. Mostly nut related.

[Nick Nevis]

An investing app called Acorns reached out, expressing some interest. Mark and Peanut did some videos for a peanut butter company, Also a website called nuts.com.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Sorry, what is nuts.com?

[Mark Longo]

So nuts.com is just a, like, website where you can buy a variety of different nuts, you know, so it Definitely worked out perfectly.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Now Mark says there's just a natural limit to the kind of brand opportunities that'll flow to a squirrel. Peanut wasn't exactly Kim Kardashian, but.

[Nick Nevis]

But Mark and Peanut had gotten their first taste of the strange ways you can turn attention into money on the Internet. Their first steps down the squirrel hole.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And then one day, Mark says someone from the website Cameo reached out to get Peanut on the platform. And this is the second big moment where Peanut story intersects with the modern attention economy and how it's changed over the past decade.

[Nick Nevis]

For listeners who missed Cameo, this is a site that blew up during COVID lockdowns that allowed Internet celebrities to monetize their very particular level of fame by offering these, like, customized little shout out videos to paying customers.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Like, you could get your favorite side character from Seinfeld to wish your Aunt Vovie a happy birthday.

[Mark Longo]

So happy birthday, Vovi. It's the soup Nazi from Seinfeld. Remember me? No soup for you. Hey, yo, what's up, peeps? This is Shao and Pod.

[Nick Nevis]

I'm Lindsay Lohan.

[Mark Longo]

Hi, everybody. Stormy Daniels here.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Hey, Ida, it's Sean Spicer.

[Mark Longo]

Hey, Alyssa.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Jon Lovitz here.

[NPR Sponsor Voice]

I want to congratulate you on graduating college.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Cameo was an innovation on the attention economy model. Because before, while creators had been able to make money through brand deals, it was the platforms like Instagram and YouTube that were making the lion's share of the profits from all this attention. By using user data to sell targeted ads, Cameo offered a way for niche celebrities to sell themselves directly to individual consumers.

[Nick Nevis]

Cameo would take a cut 25 to 30%, and in exchange, they would help their clients monetize their fame. One big part of that puzzle was helping these micro celebrities to figure out the right price to charge.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Early on, Cameo suggested people set their prices by calculating how much they are usually paid per minute based on their salary. Like, if you are an NBA star making $25 million a year, you should be making about $200aminute, which could help you set your rate for a 32nd birthday video.

[Nick Nevis]

Peanut, of course, did not have an annual salary that Mark could use to set a rate. They kind of arbitrarily picked like 30 bucks a video. But Mark says it wasn't about the money. They were just happy to be there.

[Mark Longo]

The coolest part about it was they were classifying Peanut as the same as, like a lot of the celebrities that you see in movies.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark would dress Peanut up in costume and have him hold a little post it note with whatever message had been ordered. They did birthdays, valentines, even a proposal with Cameo. They had taken their second step down the squirrel hole of the attention economy.

[Nick Nevis]

But Mark says Peanut only ended up selling a few cameos a month. Again, it's just hard for a rodent to compete with the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The bigger acorn jackpot was still to.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Come, and it was actually Mark who would become the star of this next chapter. He says it wasn't too long before he started to notice that a lot of the attention they were getting was directed toward him. Mark is a buff guy, works out a lot, and he explains he'd often wear these tight fitting gym pants in Peanuts videos.

[Mark Longo]

The Internet did what the Internet does best and sexualized every ounce of that page. You know, and it's like, oh, you hike up your pants. I like where my pants are. Again, it's just you're. You're turning this story into something it's not.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

They're accusing you of, like, thirst trapping.

[Mark Longo]

Oh, 100%. And I'm like, guys, you can go on any social media platform and literally see people naked. If you're going to put me in the realm of thirst traps with a squirrel, I'm fully clothed, not showing off anything, and I'm just jumping around with a squirrel. Get your head out of the gutter. Enjoy the squirrel.

[Nick Nevis]

But thirst trap or not, Mark told us he soon got a message from a kind of surprising source. A manager representing performers on OnlyFans. And this was Mark and Peanut's third step down the squirrel hole of the rapidly changing attention economy.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

OnlyFans, for the uninitiated, is a video streaming platform where content creators make customized content for paying subscribers. Mostly, it's homemade adult content. It's kind of like the etsy of porn. OnlyFans customers can subscribe to a performer's channel for a flat fee and then pay for premium perks, like private video conversations with their favorite performer or access to increasingly intimate photos and videos like Cameo.

[Nick Nevis]

The idea behind the OnlyFans model was to allow performers to sell their content directly to fans instead of selling targeted ads. OnlyFans takes a 20% commission of what their customers spend and sends the rest to the performers. For some creators, it's made digital sex work highly lucrative. And that's why the OnlyFans talent manager first reached out to Mark.

[Mark Longo]

They were like, listen, you might not understand your value on social media, but we do. And you come off as a very innocent man with an animal. Could you imagine if we were to kind of shift from A to Z. Put you on OnlyFans what you can make.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Successful OnlyFans performers can make six or even seven figure salaries more than Mark was making as a building site inspector. The manager told Mark if he could convert enough peanut fans from Instagram into paying customers on OnlyFans, they could make a killing.

[Nick Nevis]

So Mark went to his wife to talk about the idea of them starting their own page, making adult content together, and she was open to it. Then he spoke with his parents and with his bosses at work to see if they would raise any major objections, and none of them did.

[Mark Longo]

So I kind of just sat down, was like, you know what, let's give this a shot. If this turns out to be something, then here's the start of a new chapter of our life. If it gets shot down or it doesn't work, I'm naked on the Internet. Everybody's got the same parts, like, so what?

[Nick Nevis]

And if you are wondering whether Peanut himself ever appeared on Mark's OnlyFans page, Mark says the answer is an emphatic no. Peanut was never a part of any adult content.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Apparently, when you are building a social media empire consisting of both wholesome animal content and bespoke home made pornography, just like the Ghostbusters warrant, it is essential that you never cross the streams. When did you get a sense that OnlyFans might actually be a much more lucrative way of harnessing the attention of the Internet?

[Mark Longo]

Within minutes, literally. We launched it at like 10 o'clock in the morning and within the first 20 minutes I had a couple thousand subscribers because I already had kind of that group of people that were just waiting for me to open that door. And when I did, it just, everybody just flowed in.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

We call that pent up demand.

[Mark Longo]

Yes, yes. And it very much was.

[Nick Nevis]

And when it came to Mark's OnlyFans.

[Mark Longo]

Business strategy, my thing was like, I kept my subscription price low. You could come and see kind of highlights, but also you could incentivize people to buy the more, you know, X rated stuff kind of pick from my so called menu of what you liked. Like for instance, like put a cowboy hat or put my construction hat on, you know, do a strip tease or whatever you want. You know, I'm willing to sell my underwear. So literally anything that I was putting out turned to gold.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

How much did the underwear go for?

[Mark Longo]

I think it was like between 50 and $200. But it ranged like if you wanted me to wear them three times at the gym, you know, it was a little bit more.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Pretty soon, Mark says He and his wife are bringing in over $10,000 a month through their OnlyFans page, thanks to this enthusiastic group of Peanuts followers. It was enough money that they started to think about how they might build something bigger and longer lasting out of these eclectic streams of attention.

[Nick Nevis]

They knew that Peanut wouldn't be around forever. Eastern gray squirrels can live up to 20 years in captivity, though their average lifespan is usually only around six. And they also knew they couldn't make adult content on OnlyFans forever.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And that is when they went in on the idea of creating an animal sanctuary. Peanut had been a rescue animal. Mark was like, what better way could there be to turn Peanut's brand into a lasting legacy and source of income? They thought that if they could run it as a nonprofit, they'd be able to take donations and use Peanut's massive social media following to build a community who could help sustain it years into the future.

[Mark Longo]

Peanut has millions of followers and we just went, okay, if we can get a dollar, we can get $5, we can get $20 from a fraction of those people. We already have the following. We have the kind of the foundation of what we need here.

[Nick Nevis]

By the spring of 2023, Mark and his wife finally put together enough money to realize their dream. They bought a large plot of land in rural upstate New York and opened up their animal sanctuary, which they named Peanuts Freedom Farm.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Around the same time, Mark quit his job as a building site inspector to dedicate himself full time to the farm. He and his wife started buying old and injured horses who'd been neglected or were destined for the slaughterhouse.

[Nick Nevis]

They got goats, donkeys, alpacas, eventually over 300 animals in total, sometimes costing over $30,000 a month. And in order to feed this growing menagerie, Mark's life became this bizarre encapsulation of the modern tension economy.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

On a typical day last year, before everything changed, Mark would wake up at 5am to feed the animals. Then he might take a shower while making a sexually explicit video for a paying stranger on OnlyFans. Then he might run Peanut through some of their classic bits to make content for the Instagram account, followed by a video for the animal sanctuary's non profit donors to show them that the rescue donkeys were actually getting the care they needed. It was this kind of miraculous, precarious social media Rube Goldberg machine.

[Nick Nevis]

Until, that is, that fateful day last fall when a convoy of SUVs from the new York State Department of Environmental Conservation pulled into Mark's driveway.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Internet sensation Peanut the squirrel has been Killed DC Officers seized that animal, who.

[NPR Sponsor Voice]

Was found injured on the streets of.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Manhattan seven years ago. You got to wonder what. What is going on in America?

[NPR Sponsor Voice]

Let's hear from.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

In the aftermath of Peanut's death, Mark was devastated and confused. On the one hand, he just lost his best friend and business partner, and on the other, he'd never been so squarely at the center of the Internet's attention in his life. All of a sudden, he had politicians and celebrities and strangers from all around the world reaching out to offer their outrage and condolences.

[Mark Longo]

You know, I had the owner of the Yankees reach out. I have Quentin Tarantino in my DMs. I have my favorite bands reaching out, going, what can we do to help?

[Nick Nevis]

At the same time, Mark was acutely aware that the charismatic squirrel, whose fame had been helping him make money and feed hundreds of mouths, was now gone. The stream of new squirrel content that had drawn in so many eyeballs and opportunities over the years had been cut off. And the magnitude of his expenses was starting to dawn on him.

[Mark Longo]

How the hell are we going to continue this nonprofit without our star and our golden squirrel? Those are the things that are going through. I'm like, wow, Instagram's gonna go down TikTok Tock. I'm not going to be able to build this stuff. You know, where am I going to get the funding for these animals? I already have the animals. What is. What are going to happen to the animals if I can't feed them? This place is going to ultimately shut down.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark was in a kind of anxiety spiral, thinking about where all of this.

[Mark Longo]

Might lead, that I'm going to be just reamed in the. In the news, in the. In pr. Like Mark, you know, failed at his nonprofit, and, you know, all of this is now transpiring, and I'm like, I gotta figure this out.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Mark and his wife started by creating an emergency GoFundMe page. While Peanut's death was still at the top of the news cycle, they also began a legal campaign to try to press the government for answers about what had happened to Peanut.

[Nick Nevis]

And it's around this time that Mark was made aware of the latest and most lucrative new evolution of the modern attention economy. Something that would present the possibility of previously unimaginable wealth, but also the peril of losing control of his story altogether.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

How did you first find out that Peanut had been turned into some form of cryptocurrency?

[Mark Longo]

I'm sitting in the gym working out. I get a phone call from my lawyer, and she's just instantly, Mark, what is this? Peanut coin on crypto? It's at 2 billion. Are you involved in this? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

It took a while for Mark to piece this together, but it appeared that just hours after the news of Peanut's death started going viral, some anonymous person or group online had turned Peanut into a meme coin, a kind of joke cryptocurrency. The meme coin featured an iconic image of Mark holding Peanut with a cowboy hat. And it had the ticker sign P.

[Nick Nevis]

N u T. It turned out that there was an enormous new meme coin market fueled almost literally on attention. A kind of new casino where anonymous hoards gamble on viral memes in hopes of making outrageous sums of money.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Now, Mark knew barely anything about crypto at this point, but he understood there were now thousands of total strangers cumulatively making millions of dollars off of Peanut's good name on the Internet. And none of those profits were flowing to Mark or the animal sanctuary.

[Mark Longo]

And I'm like, you kidding me? Like, it's, you know, we're not talking about, like, you made 1,000 bucks. Like, you made $100 million off of this story and you didn't include me in my family.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

After the break, Mark Longo takes his final step into the deepest, darkest recesses of the squirrel hole.

[Nick Nevis]

He dives headfirst into the meme coin casino to try to find financial justice for Peanut.

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[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Okay, so for the first seven years of his life with Peanut the Squirrel, Mark Longo had managed to keep control over the growing streams of attention they generated together, like on Instagram or TikTok or OnlyFans. But in the wake of Peanut's death, in the world of meme coins, Mark discovered he had little or no control. Peanut's viral popularity had been leveraged by a group of anonymous crypto insiders into ludicrous amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark couldn't figure out exactly who was behind the Peanut coin, and neither could we. The people who launch these meme coins are generally very careful not to reveal their identities. But from what Mark could see, these people were presenting the coin as if he had helped make it. And he felt like the story was being taken away from him.

[Mark Longo]

Because when you go on their website, the first photo on there is me with Peanut. People were representing this coin as if it was mine. So I can't even tell you the amount of thousands of people reached out, like, bought your Peanut coin, made money off your Peanut coin. Hope you're doing well. I hope all this works out for the farm. And I'm like, I haven't a clue what you're talking about.

[Nick Nevis]

Over the next month, Mark would get a lot more than a clue. He started to wade deeper and deeper into the world of meme coins in hopes of getting a cut of these massive profits they were making. And he discovered that not only had people made meme coins out of Peanut, but several of his other farm animals.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

At first, he says, some of the people who seemed to be behind these coins did offer to make donations to the animal sanctuary. All they asked was that Mark basically promote their coins on social media. Once he did, they sent him donations, some in the form of meme coins. But Mark says soon after, some of those traders figured out a way to take back their donations.

[Nick Nevis]

And partly in retaliation for that, and partly because he needed real money to feed his animals, Mark sold off a big chunk of the coins he'd been given. Doing that caused the price of that coin to collapse at the expense of everyone still holding it. And Mark's reputation in the crypto world took a dramatic turn south. People started calling him a scammer.

[Mark Longo]

And that's when it started to flip. Like, oh, we donated money to Mark in coins. He sold the coins. He ruined the chart.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Still, Mark was not deterred. Vast sums of money seemed tantalizingly close, maybe within reach. If he won big on a meme coin, he could stop doing only fans. He would never have to worry about the money to feed his 300 plus rescue animals. So he says when some acquaintances offered to help him create a competing peanut meme coin that they could market as the one true peanut based cryptocurrency, he took them up on their offer. He wanted to fight meme coin with meme coin.

[Nick Nevis]

To get a sense of what this all looked like to the people inside the meme coin casino, we talked to a guy named Wilk Itson.

[F]

In the real world, I am a real estate agent, but in the meme coin world, I identify as Rumi.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Your gnome to crypto.

[F]

Yeah, my gnome to crypto.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Rumi says that finding the most profitable meme coins is all about keeping track of what's popping off in the zeitgeist. He keeps news notifications on for all sorts of outlets, but he says that sensational stories from the right wing of the political spectrum often get the most traction. Another big thing he watches for are animal coins. From the original meme coin dogecoin to a recent one based off of Mu Dang the pygmy hippo, animal coins have proven to be a highly lucrative asset class.

[Nick Nevis]

So when Rumi heard that a famous squirrel had become a right wing political martyr and that he'd been turned into a meme coin, it got his attention.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And at what point did you decide to get in on, on, on the peanut coin?

[F]

I got in pretty much when it was created and I threw some dust at it.

[Nick Nevis]

By dust, Rumi is speaking crypto for money. He says he bought $100 worth of peanut when it had a market cap of a few hundred thousand dollars.

[F]

And it was going so fast, it took me like three attempts to buy into it.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

But Rumi says he got nervous pretty quickly. He decided to hop off the peanut rocket after making only a few thousand dollars. And then he just kind of moved on. Watched the peanut coin situation from afar. When Elon Musk started tweeting about peanut, the price of the coin skyrocketed and eventually reached a market cap of over $2 billion.

[Nick Nevis]

Remy says the next he heard about peanut was when Mark Longo took to social media to start talking up his competing meme coin, the one he called Justice.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

And listening to Mark's pitch, Rimmy says it was clear that Mark was getting something fundamentally wrong about how the meme coin world works. Mark seemed to be making a sort of earnest appeal about how switching Peanut meme coins would somehow bring justice for his untimely death. But Rumi says Mark was speaking largely to people who were just looking to profit.

[F]

Most of these people are just getting involved in these projects to make money for the dream of making generational wealth and walking away from your 9 to 5 and never looking back, right? It's the world's biggest Ponzi scheme. Let's not get it twisted. Because whoever buys first makes money off whoever buys next, right? And it's a. It goes up and up and up from there.

[Nick Nevis]

M says he didn't really buy Mark's altruistic pitch for his new coin. And the other thing Mark was getting wrong was his timing. Mark was hawking his justice coin weeks after Peanut's death. The viral curve around the story had already started to flatten.

[F]

The energy of it was already used up. And that's the thing. It's all an attention economy. People moved on. And it's sad, but that works for everything. That creates an uproar. It lasts for a week, two weeks, and people are already in Peanut. They're not going to go to justice. Right? Peanut was the thing that represented justice for Peanut.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Nevertheless, Mark persisted. The justice meme coin fell apart after Mark and his partners started accusing each other of fraudulent behavior. So Mark actually launched another Peanut coin. But so far, that one too has failed to gain traction. It's currently stalled at a market cap of just a few hundred thousand dollars.

[Nick Nevis]

In the meantime, Mark has decided that if he can't join the crypto insiders that successfully made money off these Peanut based meme coins, he's going to try to beat them legally to go after them for using his intellectual property to create and promote their coins.

[Mark Longo]

You go on their website, it literally has a photo of me, literally had my sanctuary, literally had my photos. And they use this to base, base their whole project on my story. So I was like, you have two options. Either include me or I sue you guys to get everything taken back. And they were just like, you, you have no power here. We made Peanut's story, we did this. And I'm like, your crypto game didn't do to my story. The story was already here and you're using it to make money.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

Because the people behind the Peanut coin are anonymous, Mark isn't able to sue them directly. So instead, Mark's lawyers have filed cease and desist letters against the major crypto exchanges where the biggest Pean meme coins are listed. He alleges they violated his copyright by using his photos and that they violate a trademark that he's recently applied for. The strategy is still something of a long shot, but there have been some successful court cases arguing for ownership of memes. And if he were to successfully get some of these coins delisted, it could have major implications for the whole world of Meme coins.

[Nick Nevis]

As we wrapped up our interview with Mark surrounded by Peanut memorabilia inside the squirrel's old room, it's clear that Mark himself is still just trying to emotionally process everything that's happened over the last year.

[Mark Longo]

I never thought I'd be somebody who has to fight trauma like I'm about. I cried before you guys came here. I don't have enough time in my day to focus on grieving, so, you know, I have to focus that anger into motivation and positivity because if I don't, I'm going to just mentally break down myself.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

So the house that Peanut built feels a bit like a straw house at the moment.

[Mark Longo]

Absolutely. You know, we're hanging on by a thread.

[Nick Nevis]

Mark says if he's learned anything from his journey into the depths of the attention economy, it's how fickle and impermanent the world's attention really is. So he's doing what he can to keep Peanut's story alive. It's a big part of why he invited Planet Money into Peanut's inner sanctum. It's why he's entertaining proposals to turn his story into a documentary for places like Hulu and Netflix. Maybe the next Tiger King will be about him and Peanut.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

In the meantime, Mark says that he and his family are making ends meet. They're covering their costs through a mixture of donations and OnlyFans revenue. He's still holding out hope that the anonymous traders behind the most popular peanut based cryptocurrencies will eventually cut him in on the proceeds. And he hopes that one day he won't have to keep making OnlyFans content to keep his rescue animals alive. If you want to know why everyone seems to be releasing meme coins these days, from literal children to C list celebrities to the President of the United States, check out our recent episode, the Meme Coin Casino. It's the story of how Meme Coins went from a one off joke to a massive speculative frenzy. Worth tens of billions of dollars. This episode was produced by James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang, Fact Checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

[Nick Nevis]

Special thanks to Jennifer Jenkins, Yesha Yadav, Max Berwick and Yulia Guseva. I'm Nick Nevis.

[Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi]

I'm Alexi Horowitz. Ghazi. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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