Jess Jiang
speaker
70 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Jess Jiang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
On a typical day last year, before everything changed, Mark would wake up at 5 a.m. 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.
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, you had politicians and celebrities and strangers from all around the world reaching out to offer their outrage and condolences.
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.
How did you first find out that peanut had been turned into some form of cryptocurrency?
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-N-U-T.
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.
After the break, Mark Longo takes his final step into the deepest, darkest recesses of the squirrel hole.
OK, 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.
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 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
Fast sums of money seemed tantalizingly close, maybe within reach. If he won big on a meme coin, he could stop doing OnlyFans. 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.
You're numb to crypto?
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 Mudang the Pygmy Hippo, animal coins have proven to be a highly lucrative asset class.
And at what point did you decide to get in on the peanut coin?
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