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Just buy a rigid 90's mtb and switch out the cockpit, can be done well for less than a quarter of the cost of that shitty meme bike. If you know what you're looking for you can pick up a barely ridden top tier bike for under $500, it'll cost maybe another $100 and some light hex spanner action to transform it.
Things to look out for.
>Top quality steel tubing (tange, prestige, columbus, reymolds etc)
>Signs of low mileage and good maintenance, check rim braking surface wear first, if it has the original wheels and this surface is still flat and clean then you have a garage queen, snap it up.
>Shimano groupsets - LX, DX, XT or XTR are all fantastic, Suntour - XC-Pro, XC -Comp, XC-LTD, X1 or XXD are all great.
>Any period boutique parts - Hope, Cook bros, Bullseye, Paul's etc can vastly inflate the value of the bike, it's possible to buy a bike, sell a single component from it, get more than you paid for the bike including enough to replace the parts you're selling with more than adequate substitutes and make a tidy profit. As an example I bought a bike for £180 and sold the wheelset (hope hubs), the canti brakes (Paul),the front derailleur (Paul) and the tyres (barely ridden IRC Trailbear tanwalls) for more than £800, I replaced those with perfectly decent XT equivalents for less than £150. So basically I got a race specced bike for free and £500+ in the bank all for a few hours work.
If you find a bike that ticks these boxes for under $500 and it fits you then buy it, you can get some dirt drop bars, levers and shifters cheap from ebay and you're all set.
Picrel cost me less than £250 all in, full XTR and a blast to ride on or off road.
