Musk and CZ Revive Meme Feud as Bitcoin Crashes Below $80K

Elon Musk and Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao are at it again. The two reignited their feud on Friday, trading memes while a stock selloff bled into crypto, according to BeInCrypto. It all kicked off under a post from Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who had just woken up in Japan and asked how the market was doing.

Musk struck first. He replied with a blurry, red-tinted image of CZ — a wink at the red candles lighting up every price chart. That jab brought back memories of October 29, when North Korea-linked hackers pulled roughly $6.3 billion from Binance. Musk dropped laughing emojis under a security warning from CZ at the time; CZ called it a bad moment to troll and asked Musk for “a little support.”

This time, CZ played along. He fired back with a cartoon of a figure crouching on the ground, an arrow buried in its bleeding leg. About an hour later, Binance co-founder and co-CEO Yi He jumped in, quoting Musk’s post alongside the red pill/blue pill scene from The Matrix. She posted green-tinted and red-tinted versions of Musk’s CZ image and asked followers which colored pill they’d pick.

The jokes landed on traders nursing real losses. The pain started in US equities — on Thursday, a slump in AI chip stocks triggered a $2 trillion wipeout that rolled across global markets overnight. By the time Markus logged on in Japan, Asia was taking heavy fire. South Korea’s KOSPI index sank below 5,000, triggering a circuit breaker after an 8% slide.

Crypto caught the contagion. One trader lost 201 BTC — about $15.6 million at the time — across eight straight liquidations, with leveraged long bets taking the worst of it. Bitcoin slid below $80,000 and hit its lowest level in a month.

What comes next may hinge far more on stocks than on memes. Crypto analyst Ben Cowen has warned that a 2018-style selloff could drag Bitcoin back to $58,000 — a drop that would stretch this crash well past the week.