Hunter Biden

Introduction

Hunter Biden, the American attorney and businessman convicted of federal firearms and tax offenses before receiving a full federal pardon from his father in December 2024, re-entered the public spotlight on September 9, 2026, by launching $LAPTOP, a memecoin built on the same “laptop” controversy that dogged him through the 2020 election. The token, issued on Coinbase’s Base layer-2 network, peaked at $190.81 two minutes after opening, implied a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion against a liquidity pool holding $48,000, and lost roughly 99% of that value within hours — a pattern critics immediately labeled a rug pull.

Background Information

Born February 4, 1970, in Wilmington, Delaware, the second son of Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1996 and became an attorney. He served on the board of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019 while his father was vice president, a role at the center of the Ukraine interference allegations that intensified after the New York Post published its October 2020 laptop story. In 2023 he was indicted on three federal firearms charges — two false statements on a gun purchase form and one prohibited possession while a drug user — and was convicted of all three in June 2024 after admitting he owned a firearm while a drug user. In September 2024 he pleaded guilty to the tax charges, and on December 1, 2024, his father pardoned him for all federal offenses committed between 2014 and 2024. In 2025 he was disbarred in both Washington, D.C. and Connecticut and began working as the development director of a nonprofit tenants’ rights organization.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Adjudicated vs. alleged. Hunter Biden’s convictions on the three federal firearms charges and his guilty pleas to the tax charges are matters of court record, and the 2014-2019 Burisma board seat is a matter of public record. The Ukraine interference allegations are unproven and were never criminally charged; his father’s pardon erased the federal consequences of the convictions. The conduct at issue here is the $LAPTOP launch itself, which carries no charges or adjudication.

In an X post on September 8, 2026 that drew nearly 5 million views, Biden announced he was launching the $LAPTOP memecoin, a plan first reported by the Wall Street Journal, framing it as a reclamation of the symbol used against him: “The symbol they used to try to end me is now a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery. … They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token.” He pitched 20% of the supply as a community airdrop — including to people who lost money on the TRUMP token — and 30% tied to a “pre-programmed mechanism” that would burn the tokens if publicly stated real-world events occurred and send them to charity otherwise, with a further 50 million tokens going to charity regardless. “You should not expect me or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you,” he wrote. On-chain detective Stephen Findeisen, known as “Coffeezilla,” publicly criticized the launch and advised people not to buy it.

The launch on Base at 8 a.m. ET on September 9 played out as the pattern it was widely predicted to: according to blockchain-intelligence firm Arkham, LAPTOP hit $190.81 within two minutes, a peak implying a fully diluted valuation near $144 billion against a liquidity pool holding only $48,000. Within 30 minutes it had shed about 90% of its value; by the one-hour mark it traded near $4.77, and by afternoon it had stabilized in the low single digits around $1.97 — down nearly 99% from its intraday high, though still worth roughly $780 million in market cap and $2.2 billion fully diluted, which kept it inside the top 100 crypto assets by market cap. On-chain trackers showed snipers profiting in real time: one wallet pulled $249,800 from Binance before launch, bought 9,124 LAPTOP, and sold most of it minutes later for roughly $1.18 million; another spent about $200,000 on 919 tokens near $218 apiece, a position worth under $3,000 an hour later.

Biden defended the launch in a follow-up X post, blaming the spike on “technical issues coupled with predatory ‘snipers’” and claiming “the team’s allocation is locked. Nobody on our side sold, and nobody could have. I, personally, have not made a single dollar.” X placed a Community Note fact-check on that post, which stated that on-chain data showed a project multisig wallet received 100 million tokens — 10% of supply — before launch and had since sold approximately 42.5 million of them. On-chain detective Stephen Findeisen, known as “Coffeezilla,” publicly criticized the launch and advised people not to buy it.

Public Reaction and Consequences

Reaction was immediate and sharply partisan. Headlines within 24 hours read “Token down 99%. Rug pull. Biden Crime Family,” and Biden’s own defense post opened with “The headlines are all the same.” His claims about the launch’s mechanics and his personal proceeds drew the fact-check label described above, and the token’s arc — a two-minute spike against thin liquidity followed by a 99% collapse — tracked almost exactly the debut of the TRUMP and Melania tokens, which Decrypt noted had cost nearly one million wallets an estimated $3.81 billion. A first airdrop sent 8% of supply to newsletter subscribers in mid-September, with unclaimed tokens set to be burned after October 9.

Current Status

As of September 14, 2026, LAPTOP trades in the low single-digit cent range: CoinMarketCap showed it at roughly $0.215, down about 21% in 24 hours, ranked #277 with a market cap near $75 million, against a circulating supply of 350 million and max supply of 985 million tokens. Biden continues posting about the token on X — announcing event-tied burns, airdrop deadlines, and defending the price action — while otherwise carrying out the life he has settled into since the pardon: disbarred from both bars that licensed him and working for a tenants’ rights nonprofit. The legal aftermath of the laptop era — conviction, plea, pardon, disbarment — is closed; the LAPTOP token is the open thread.

Impact on Their Career and Life

The token launch is the least consequential financial event of Biden’s public life, but the most revealing: he turned the single story that defined his cancellation into a revenue narrative, priced it against his father’s pardoned convictions, and watched it lose 99% of its value within a day. His legal career is over — disbarred in two jurisdictions — and his pardon foreclosed further federal prosecution, so the remaining public role is the one the token created: an X account that markets his own downfall as a brand, with the token’s continued decline as its recurring plotline.