In 2025, a handful of ultra-famous names turned online influence into real on-chain revenue. But how did they actually make the money, what coins or chains did they lean on, and did fame help or backfire? Let’s dig into three very different playbooks, then you can decide which one (if any) deserves a spot on your watchlist.
If you want to learn more than just how to bet with SOL or buy staff with Bitcoin, this research should be interesting for you.
Elon Musk: Dogecoin’s loudest amplifier
Musk’s crypto arc started with Tesla’s headline-grabbing $1.5 billion Bitcoin buy in early 2021 — disclosed in an SEC filing — and the equally public decision to sell ~75% of that stack in Q2 2022 to boost liquidity during China lockdowns. Still, Tesla held over $1 billion in BTC by 2025. SpaceX also retains hundreds of millions in Bitcoin and even moved $150 million worth of BTC in late 2025 as Bitcoin hit a peak.
Where Musk has been consistently hands-on is with Dogecoin. Tesla still lets fans buy selected merch with DOGE (Tesla’s own support page explains how checkout works), and that ongoing acceptance has kept Doge deeply tied to Musk’s brand flywheel.
Does Musk’s fame move prices? Yes, at least in the short run. Musk’s crypto tweets link to abnormal returns, volume spikes, and episodes of “price explosivity,” especially for Dogecoin. That’s textbook fame-as-force-multiplier: one post, millions of eyeballs, reflexive buying, and then volatility.
The upside of that reach is obvious: cheaper distribution than any ad campaign. The downside: it cuts both ways. When he praised or trolled a coin, traders front-ran each other and whipsawed retail; Tesla’s own BTC U-turn also showed how corporate crypto moves get judged in real time. In short, Musk didn’t just invest in crypto; he pressurized it, with Dogecoin as the recurring star.
Snoop Dogg: Turning culture into TON-powered cash flows
If Musk is crypto’s megaphone, Snoop Dogg is its showman. In July 2025, he dropped nearly 996,000 collectible “Gifts” on Telegram — digital items minted on the TON blockchain — and they sold out in ~30 minutes, grossing about $12 million, per Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s post.
How it worked: Fans bought animated collectibles inside Telegram; minting on TON and a built-in secondary market were slated to open about three weeks later. So the buy-in happened first, the on-chain mint followed, then trading. That funnel (audience → purchase → mint → resale) baked virality and scarcity into a familiar app, removing crypto’s typical onboarding friction.
Here, fame was the entire distribution engine. Snoop’s global brand meant the drop didn’t need complicated tokenomics; it needed a place his fans already hang out (Telegram) and a chain that could settle quickly (TON). The risk, of course, is durability — celebrity drops can surge, then fade. But as a 2025 cash play, it was surgical: huge top-of-funnel, low-friction checkout, and immediate social proof from a sold-out banner.
Donald Trump: From NFTs to a memecoin machine
Whatever you think of him politically, Donald Trump turned crypto into a serious revenue stream. His pre-presidency NFT trading cards sold out multiple times (Forbes tracked the 2023 drop at $4.6 million in sales), and by 2025, his orbit expanded into tokens and a broader web3 push. Bloomberg estimates that crypto ventures added hundreds of millions to his net worth this year — pegging the bump at about $620 million at mid-year — and separately reported $57.7 million earned from token sales tied to World Liberty Financial.
What’s the mechanism? A mix of IP monetization (NFTs), memecoin economics (community demand around a ticker explicitly tied to his persona), and platform plays (a crypto firm aligned with his brand). The fame effect was rocket fuel, but it also drew extra scrutiny: from a Washington Post-covered private dinner with top coin holders, to congressional inquiries into the ethical lines of a sitting president profiting from token activity. Fame opened the door to capital.
What’s more, doesn’t matter what the Trump Coin price is or was — every time people sell and buy the tokens, Trump-owned companies profit from sales fees.
The Takeaway
Three different strategies, one common thread: distribution. Musk’s megaphone turned memes into markets, Snoop’s cultural cachet made TON collectibles feel like merch drops, and Trump’s political celebrity converted attention into high-velocity token sales. Fame didn’t just help; it shaped the rails (what to sell), the venues (where to sell it), and the outcomes (how fast cash arrived).
Still, such crypto trading was successful for the coin-makers, but if you want to profit yourself, you should look at more than the famous name.