More than three years ago, before he became a millionaire the first time around, Glauber Contessoto borrowed $1,500 from his aunt Cristiane Almaraz to invest in Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that started as a joke about an internet dog meme. In return, once Doge shot to the moon as Contessoto believed it would, he promised her a house.

As of late November when we recorded a Zoom conversation together, Contessoto had $2.2 million in Doge. He has even more in other cryptocurrencies.

He’s planning to sell some of the incredibly volatile Dogecoin in six to eight months, when he thinks the price will more than triple. Alamaraz wants him to sell now.

“Ultimately at that point I’ll have $10 million, so with $10 million even a million-dollar house wouldn’t affect my finances that much,” said Contessoto.

“I don’t need a million dollar house,” Almaraz said.

“You live in Maryland, you need a million dollar house,” said Contessoto.

Almaraz is a housekeeper, her husband works as an Amazon driver and they have two kids. She said after a car theft forced them to buy a new vehicle, they’re down to about $5,000 in savings.

Part of Almaraz’s frustration is that she feels like she’s seen this movie before.

“Cause Dogecoin is very unstable, so how can you guarantee that in six months you will do that, you know?” Almaraz asked.  

“Because I’m basing this off of patterns,” said Contessoto. “Trends, patterns, charts, graphs. I do crypto full time now, right? I study this.”

At one point in 2021, after investing his life savings in Dogecoin, Contessoto had about $3 million in the memcoin and became a kind of crypto celebrity. His YouTube channel and social media popularity made the “Dogecoin millionaire” the most famous Dogecoin evangelist not named Elon Musk.

And then just a year later, as all that buzz for Bitcoin and NFTs cooled and crypto winter settled in, the “Dogecoin millionaire” became the “Dogecoin former millionaire.”

“I remember very vividly, I was in the parking lot of the gym that I would go to,” says Contessoto. “And I was sitting in the car watching it just plummet, and watching the amount in my Robin Hood dump down all the way to $200,000.”

But Contessoto stuck with the memecoin that brought him here, and pushed the money he was receiving from crypto-related endorsements into more Doge, as well as other crypto.

“There are days where I think ‘Oh, I kind of wish I would have sold.’ But ultimately that’s not where my heart was, and I’m very big on following my gut feelings on things,” Contessoto said.

That gut ultimately proved right. Doge started rising again in 2024, partly in line with Trump’s poll numbers. The former president had pledged to lighten regulations on crypto on the campaign trail.

And then after the election, something extraordinary happened. One of those glitches in the matrix that makes you question not only whether you’re living in a simulation, but whether it’s a simulation specifically designed to mock you for responsibly stowing your retirement money away in an index fund.

Trump announced plans to create the Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE for short — an organization tasked with slashing the federal bureaucracy, which Musk had half-jokingly proposed before the election.

Dogecoin soared. Since the election, it’s up more than 120%.

“That’s like branding that’s perfect right?,” said Contessoto. “I couldn’t have created that in a better way.”

Trump and his DOGE have been a huge financial boon for Contessoto. But there’s another part of Trump’s agenda that could be a major problem.

“I am currently undocumented as of right now,” said Contessoto. “Yeah, I don’t have papers.”

Contessoto came to the U.S. from Brazil when he was 5. His mother has a green card, but he’s still trying to get legal status.

“I have conflicting emotions about Trump,” said Contessoto. “Financially speaking he’s probably the best bet. On the other side I could get a knock on the door next week and I’m deported. And everything I know just goes up in flames.”

Over the holidays Contessoto is actually outside the U.S., tending to a family emergency. He’s unsure whether he’ll even be allowed back into the United States without his papers.

For the first time in years, he won’t be spending Christmas with aunt Cristiane in Maryland. He said she can have anything she wants as a gift — short of a house.