Japanese dog who inspired ‘Dogecoin’ meme, beloved by Elon Musk, has died

The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23-billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk died on Friday, her owner said.

“She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking the fans of her Shiba Inu called Kabosu – the face of the “Doge” meme.

“I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner,” Sato wrote.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday was unknown, but Sato estimated her age at 18, past the average lifespan for a Shiba Inu, with her birthday celebrated in November.

In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Sato took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa.

She posted that image – with the fluffy Shiba Inu giving the camera a beguiling look – on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office email chains.

The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other Shiba Inu “doge” – pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.

The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for US$4 million and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of US$23 billion.

Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop star Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.

But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X – sending its value soaring – and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of