A swarm of Trump-backing reactionary big-tech accounts on X are bathing their profile pictures in a deep-fried red hue and gleaming blue laser eye filters.
The accounts sporting the new look include big names in tech like X CEO Elon Musk, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Gab CEO Andrew Torba—and some accounts are linking the profile pictures to a new memecoin called Dark MAGA.
Musk and Andreessen are recent Trump backers. While they once cultivated a more liberal business public image, in recent years they’ve come out full-throated in favor of the Republican Party. Musk claimed he would begin donating $45 million a month to a pro-Trump Super PAC. Andreessen, who is on Facebook’s board and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, announced last week that he’d be donating to Trump this election cycle.
Torba, an antisemite who runs the right-wing social media platform Gab, is a long-time Trump backer who recently praised his vice presidential pick J.D. Vance as evidence that “the board is starting to shift in our direction.”
“Something cringe is afoot,” posted @WashletJP over a compilation of some of the accounts who shifted to the red-hue blue-eyes profile picture filter.
Included alongside Andreessen, Musk, and Torba were accounts like @Aristos_Revenge, who pinned a tweet calling the new profile picture trend “red dark Maga.”
“If you want a red dark Maga pfp, visit http://dmaga.xyz courtesy of the $dmaga coin. It has a conversion tool,” they wrote in the tweet linking to the site.
$DMAGA, a meme coin built on the Solana blockchain, is being pumped by various accounts across X and crypto-pumping blogs. It has $1 million in liquidity and has jumped in value over 130,000% since July 21.
The laser eye look is part of the crypto aesthetic. While posters online have photoshopped lasers over characters' eyes for a long time, Bitcoin boosters adopted the laser eyes during a 2021 trend to show their support for holding onto Bitcoin until its value reached $100,000 per coin. Bitcoin was valued at $50,000 in Feb. 2021, when the trend started, and is valued at around $67,428 as of Monday.
According to one account claiming to be behind the coin, Musk started using the profile picture after a member of the $DMAGA team DMed it to him.
The Dark MAGA Coin didn’t immediately respond to questions asking for any proof that Musk had adopted the profile picture to support their coin, or about the history of the token.
What is Dark MAGA?
The Dark MAGA movement is not new. It began in the aftermath of Trump's 2020 election loss, pushing for a more virulent, fascist Republican takeover.
But it lost steam thanks to the Dark Brandon rebuttal, a pro-Biden riff on the right-wing "Let's Go Brandon" chant. Dark Brandon, coined ironically by some internet leftists imagining an unapologetic, take-no-prisoners Biden who implemented his own policies with as unrestrained glee as Trump did on the right. From there, Dark Brandon was picked up by pro-Biden liberal posters as a triumphant, innocuous way to celebrate Biden and turn back the Let's Go Brandon messaging to the right.
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