Why Hawk Tuah Girl’s crypto scandal may be the defining moment of 2024

A lot of moments from the past 12 months partially tell the story of 2024: An AI-generated Willy Wonka experience bumming out a bunch of children—and instantly inspiring a movie about the whole debacle. A Luigi Mangione look-alike contest drawing hundreds of fans. Disney asking a Florida court to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit based on the fact that the man who died at a Disney theme park waived his right to sue when he signed up for a free trial of Disney+.

All these instances capture how fast things tend to happen now or the treachery of tech or the strangeness of fame . . . or, how everything generally feels as if it’s on the verge of collapsing. One story from 2024, though, tidily brings all these elements together. It’s the moment Hawk Tuah Girl launched a meme coin that quickly crashed, costing her biggest fans a small fortune.

Hawk Tuah Girl, as a staggering number of people already know, is 22-year-old Tennessean Haliey Welch. Last summer, she catapulted to virality by giving a man-on-the-street interviewer a charmingly vulgar sound bite, and then managed to parlay a moment of white-hot attention into six months of ubiquity.

The fact that Welch already practically needs no introduction says a lot about the state of celebrity in 2024. One day, you haven’t heard of TikTok comedian Matt Rife; the next, he’s putting out his second top-rated Netflix special. One summer, Chappell Roan is working as a camp counselor; the next, she’s a world-famous pop star. That old chestnut about overnight success taking roughly 15 years no longer applies. These days, it happens at the drop of a catchphrase.

Monetizing the moment

The end goal of viral fame used to be a pivot into legitimate fame. About a decade ago, every Vine star (hey, remember Vine?) hoped for a backdoor path to movie stardom. That’s no longer necessarily the case. Viral fame now is often just a means of achieving further-sustained viral fame as a content creator, and then becoming professionally viral famous. To a generation raised on social media, the “viral” distinction is nonexistent. If you’re famous, you’re famous.

At the same time, what was formerly considered legitimate fame has lost some of its luster. Harrison Ford is now a sitcom star. The cop who gave Justin Timberlake a DUI over the summer reportedly had no idea who the singer was. All the superstar endorsements in the world failed to move the needle for Kamala Harris in any meaningful way, while her opponent seemed to get an enormous boost from appearing on a youth-savvy selection of Twitch streams and podcasts. The more traditional versions of fame suddenly feel less relevant than ever.

However, one thing that famous people of all stripes knew to do in 2024 was alchemize their fame into as many revenue streams as possible.

Kim Kardashian, a pioneer in the field of sustaining viral fame, just opened a flagship store for her shapewear brand, following previous business ventures that include a cosmetics line, a fragrance, a video game, an emoji-generator app, a private equity firm, and, of course, a long-running reality TV franchise. Ryan Reynolds balances movie stardom with owning a gin brand, a stake in Mint Mobile, and co-owning a Welsh football club—while doing his own marketing for them all. Seth Rogen loved pot and pottery so much, he found a way to start selling something that matched both of his interests. And lest we forget, the most famous person on the planet just this year started selling branded bibles, golden sneakers, commemorative coins, diamond-studded watches, and cologne, on top of everything else.

Leveraging one’s fame for financial gain has long been among the prime directives of celebrity. As social media-borne famous people have gained more of a foothold in pop culture, they’ve internalized that idea as well. Over the past five years, they’ve started moving beyond ad revenue and #sponcon as their main means of making bank. Upper-tier social media stars can now launch successful coffee brands, energy drinks, even a burger chain.

If you’re famous enough to pull it off, why bother doing #sponcon for anyone but yourself?

Crypto chaos

What has changed with Hawk Tuah Girl is an acceleration of the cycle. Even in the fast-moving world of social media, it took years for Emma Chamberlain to become famous enough to start selling coffee and accessories back in 2019. Hawk Tuah Girl speed-ran the whole “becoming a brand” thing in a matter of months. 

She began her public life this past June, more or less as a meme. In what felt like a flash, she branched out into paid appearances at live events, her own line of merch, the high-charting Talk Tuah podcast—Mark Cuban has been a guest—a charitable foundation for animals, and an AI-powered dating app. So, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Hawk Tuah Girl flew too close to the sun.

On December 4, she launched her own meme coin: $HAWK. The cryptocurrency’s value quickly surged to a $490 million market cap before crashing just as quickly, shedding 90% of its value in a few hours. This appeared to have all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump: an easy-to-manipulate asset with no underlying value, a mechanism for heavy promotion, and, ultimately, a truncated timeline. $HAWK fizzled out even quicker than the harshest critics predicted Welch’s fame would. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now investigating and investors are suing.

Incredibly, the last podcast Welch released before the total media blackout that followed her unfortunate crypto affair is titled: “How to Avoid Getting Cancelled.”

There’s a difference, perhaps, between feeling tricked into buying gin that isn’t to your taste because you enjoy Ryan Reynolds’s movies and being tricked into buying a worthless “pretend coin.” At least, the gin will get you drunk. But those mad at being led astray by Welch’s promise of a meme coin that is “not a cash grab” have only themselves to blame. Anyone who lived through the bursting of the celeb NFT bubble a couple years ago and still goes in for these sorts of opportunities only proves that if a person can be scammed in 2024, they almost certainly will be. 

It’s the perfect end to a year in which millions voted for a presidential candidate partly because he promised to end “the inflation nightmare,” only for him, post election, to quickly start backtracking about bringing down prices.

As for Hawk Tuah Girl, don’t write her off just yet. She’s beaten the odds before; she could do it again. Because one thing 2024 has made abundantly clear: Consequences don’t always stick.