JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Over the last decade, new online platforms have made it easier than ever to go from anonymity to online fame and fortune, but that viral success can also come at a cost. From our Planet Money podcast, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Nic Neves bring us a parable of the modern attention economy.
ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: Mark Longo was working as a building inspector in Manhattan back in 2017, when he came across an orphaned baby squirrel in the middle of the street. Mark is an animal lover, so he brought the squirrel home to nurse it back to health, and he named him Peanut.
NIC NEVES, BYLINE: Over the next year, Mark started posting videos of him and Peanut on social media, wearing little cowboy hats and sports jerseys, and the internet and the press soon fell in love.
MARK LONGO: We went on British TV, and they deemed him the world's most famous squirrel. And that's when his TikTok blew up. And that's where, you know, 100,000 followers became a few million.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: All that attention started to bring strange new opportunities. Mark and Peanut started making sponsored content for nut companies. The celebrity shoutout website Cameo invited them onto the platform.
LONGO: I fist-pumped that squirrel so many damn times because he just nailed these interviews like it was something that he was meant to do.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Peanut knew how to turn on the charm.
LONGO: Did he ever, you know, especially with ladies. Like, he was a ladies' man.
NEVES: And at some point, it became clear that some of Peanut's followers were also interested in Mark.
LONGO: I met my wife because of Peanut.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: No way.
Mark is kind of ripped. He wears these tight-fitting outfits in his Peanut videos, and a lot of their followers were posting raunchy comments about Mark. And before long, he says, he got a message from a manager representing OnlyFans creators.
NEVES: OnlyFans is a video streaming platform where creators make customized content for paying subscribers. Mostly it's homemade adult content, which was what this manager was suggesting Mark start to make.
LONGO: They were like, listen, you come off as a very innocent man with an animal. Could you imagine, if we were to kind of shift from A to Z and put you on OnlyFans, what you can make?
NEVES: Peanut himself would never appear in any adult videos. All Mark had to do was convert some Peanut fans into paying subscribers on OnlyFans.
LONGO: So I kind of just sat down and was like, you know what, let's give this a shot. If it gets shot down or it doesn't work, I'm naked on the internet. And literally, we launched at, like, 10 o'clock in the morning, and within the first 20 minutes, I had a couple thousand subscribers.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Pretty soon, Mark says, he and his wife were bringing in more than $10,000 a month through OnlyFans. They were doing so well they decided to open up a nonprofit animal sanctuary in Peanut's name. They bought a farm, started acquiring rescue horses and donkeys and alpacas, eventually totaling over 300 animals.
And for a while, everything was going well, until the morning of October 30, 2024. That's when a convoy of SUVs from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation arrived at the farm with a warrant for Peanut because, as the officers reminded Mark, he had failed to get a permit to keep wildlife as a pet.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Over the next several hours, New York State officers made Mark and his wife stand by as they scoured the property, until finally...
LONGO: I was midway on the staircase. I had three cops to my right, I had three to my left, and one of them yelled, I found Peanut. I found the squirrel.
NEVES: The officers took Peanut into custody, and after three harrowing days...
LONGO: I get a phone call from our local news station, from a gentleman that's in tears. And he's like, Mark, I don't know how to tell you, but they're gone.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: According to a statement from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Peanut had bitten someone involved with the investigation, and as part of a protocol to test whether he had rabies, Peanut had been euthanized.
NEVES: Mark was devastated, and he took to social media to tell the world what had happened. And pretty soon, the story went absolutely viral. It was all over the news.
LONGO: You're hearing Elon Musk talk about it, and you're hearing JD Vance and now Donald Trump Jr.
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DONALD TRUMP JR: Our government will let in 600,000 criminals across our border. But if someone has a pet squirrel without a permit, they go in there and kill the squirrel.
NEVES: And then...
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: How did you first find out that Peanut had been turned into some form of cryptocurrency?
LONGO: I'm sitting in the gym working out. I get a phone call from my lawyer.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: It turned out some anonymous party had turned Peanut into a meme coin, a kind of joke cryptocurrency. And in the media frenzy surrounding Peanut's death, the coin's estimated value had swelled to over $2 billion.
LONGO: And I'm like, you kidding me? Like, it's - you know, we're not talking about, like, you made a thousand bucks. You made $100 million off of this story, and you didn't include me and my family.
NEVES: Mark tried convincing the Peanut meme coin creators to cut him in on the profits. He also tried launching competing meme coins, but they collapsed in a swirl of accusations and infighting. Now he's threatening legal action against various coin creators and crypto platforms.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Mark is trying to keep Peanut's story alive however he can, but he's learned how fickle and impermanent the world's attention can be. For the moment, he says, he and his family are surviving on donations and revenue from OnlyFans.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
NEVES: Nic Neves.
HOROWITZ-GHAZI: NPR News.
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