Tech

Crypto Bros Are Building a Giant Elon Musk Goat Statue in Arizona

"The goat is sitting on a SpaceX rocket propelling past Earth and the Moon toward Mars like Elon’s vision. The goat is also surrounded by lightning to symbolize Tesla’s solar electricity and electric cars," said designer Danny Wang.
Untitled design (29)
Image: Kevin Stone photograph/ Elon Goat concept art.

An Elon Musk–themed cryptocurrency has launched. That’s hardly surprising, in this world of shitcoins with names like Elonomics and Dogelon Mars, but this one is different. To promote Elon Goat Token, its creators are building a giant half-Elon Musk, half-goat statue they plan to drive around the country before driving it to Tesla and demanding Musk take ownership of the monument.

Elon Goat Token has already launched, and those purchasing it right now are paying a small tax on every transaction that’s being used in the construction of the statue. And this isn’t just any statue. The plan depicts Musk’s head on a goat body that’s riding a rocket. There are upward-trending lines below the rocket pointing, not to the moon, but to Mars.

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“Elon GOAT Token ($EGT) is building a biblical sized monument on the back of a semi-trailer dedicated to the Godfather of Crypto, Elon Musk,” the token’s website said.

But why a statue? “At every crucial point in human history, a magnum opus, or masterpiece, has captured the essence of that period. Think of the Great Pyramids of Giza. The Statue of David. Picasso’s Guernica. The world now stands upon the brink of the greatest transfer of wealth in its entire history,” the Token’s white paper explained. “What better way to enshrine the beginning of this new blazing era, than to do so by celebrating the degenerates involved, alongside the most innovative man of the 21st Century, Elon Musk?”

You’d be forgiven for lumping Elon Goat Token in with any of the many grifts, scams, and frauds that litter the cryptocurrency landscape. Elon Goat Token is, after all, ridiculous, and its developers are anonymous on the project website (common enough in crypto, but also a potential red flag). However, Elon Goat Token does have some real names and faces behind it. 

One of the men behind this mad project is Ashley Sansalone, a U.S.-based self-described expert in construction and marketing. He said he’s been involved in several other crypto companies. “This one was just more of a passion project,” Sansalone told Motherboard on the phone.

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Why Musk? Because he’s a crypto legend, according to Sansalone. “Elon Musk essentially moves markets and crypto,” he said. “He’s always been a visionary and he’s always been a big proponent of the crypto community…so it’s a big deal to have his attention. And any time Elon tweets about anything regarding crypto, it moves markets.”

“We thought there should be a monument about it,” he said. According to Sansalone, the idea to build a giant Musk statue came to him during a late night conversation with someone he was consulting for. “It was around 3:30 in the morning,” he said, and the guy he was on the phone with wanted to do an NFT series featuring Musk as a goat. 

“I’m not a fan of fluff,” Sansalone said. “I don’t just wanna blow out 10,000 pieces of NFT that are meaningless to me, personally. You’re just promoting bullshit. I said, ‘Let’s build a huge goat. We’ll take one of the NFTs and we’ll make it.”

Sansalone contacted California-based designer Danny Wang to pick his brain about costs and logistics. He said that Wang advised him building the statute in California would be a huge pain because of regulations. “So we just said, ‘Well why don’t we just build it on a trailer indoors and we don’t have to worry about building permitting, land occupancy, and those kinds of things,” Sansalone said. “And I said, ‘Great. Well, if we do that we may as well take it to Tesla and give it to him, right?’”

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And thus the plan to build a giant statue of Elon Musk as a goat riding a rocket built on the back of a trailer in Arizona with the idea of driving it around the United States before dropping it off for Musk in Texas, was born.

Sansalone acknowledged that the whole thing may seem like a joke, but said that he’s already paid Wang a $20,000 fee to start work. Wang has posted about the project on his Instagram, as has metal artist Kevin Stone, who is working on the head.

“Yes this is happening, I just went to Arizona to check out the trailer and coordinated with the team to begin the construction,” Wang told Motherboard in an email. “Elongoat token approached me to do the design and the trailer is what we came up with. It is filled with various elements relating to Elon Musk’s ventures. The Goat is sitting on a Space X rocket propelling past earth and the moon toward Mars like Elon’s vision. The goat is also surrounded by lightning to symbolize Tesla’s solar electricity and electric cars. Finally the trailer is also towed by a Tesla Semi and the plan is to procure one so we can tow the trailer.”

Wang said he’s a huge Musk supporter. “I purchased a Tesla 9 years ago and own multiple cars from Tesla,” he said. “I believe he is doing great things to push technology forward and I love his sense of humor.”

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Stone told Motherboard he’s already started work. “Yes I am about to create the head on Elon,” he told Motherboard in an email. “I have a company in Calgary Alberta, Canada. Porterfield Studios Ltd run by Cory Porterfield who is 5 axis machining me a 6 ft bust of Elon out of sculpting Styrofoam.”

The styrofoam head is expected to arrive next week. “I will use the foam head to create an all aluminum head using the foam as a template,” Stone said. “After I’m done it will ship to Arizona where the team of fabricators that are creating the rest of the sculpture for Danny Wang and Elongoat.io. I should be done with my part in just a few months.”

Stone said he’s a crypto newbie but a huge fan of Musk. “I think Elon is an amazing individual well ahead of most of us in terms of thinking and inspiring people to create and think outside the box,” he said. “He is without a doubt the Nikola Tesla of our modern era.”

According to Sansalone, the statue will be complete in under four months and cost around $500,000. Once it’s complete, the plan is to drive it around the country and show it off before driving it to Musk, wherever he happens to be at the time. Sansalone said he assumed he’d be in Austin, Texas.

Sansalone said he hasn’t had any contact with Musk. “Elon definitely knows about it,” He said, explaining that he believes Musk frequents crypto message boards and Telegram channels where word of the statue is spreading. “So we’re just trying to impress him and see what happens as it all unfolds.”

He said that people will soon be able to watch the construction of the statue in real time as it’s put together in Arizona. Of course, anything can happen, especially in the wild world of cryptocurrency where big plans regularly speed into something resembling reality and then fall apart just as quickly. But, by the same token, there could one day be a giant statue of a goat-Elon riding a rocket and heading to Tesla HQ.