Elon Musk Sent The Price Of Dogecoin Soaring With A One-Word Tweet

After vowing to take a Twitter break on Tuesday, Elon Musk lasted less than 24 hours before returning to tweet one word early Thursday morning: “Doge.” The tweet refers to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which originally started as a joke, but is now a viable contender in the crypto market. As GameStop stocks began their descent following a coordinated buying frenzy by Reddit traders, talk began swirling around Dogecoin becoming the next big thing to take investors “to the moon,” and that prediction may be true. After Musk tweeted “Doge,” the price of the coin immediately took off and has nearly tripled in the hours since. Via The Guardian:

Dogecoin, which uses a shiba inu dog meme as its logo, was started in 2013 as a joke, after the invention of bitcoin prompted a wave of imitator cryptocurrencies. However, the joke caught on, and the coins had a market value of $6.3bn (£4.6bn) on Thursday morning, according to Coinmarketcap.com, a cryptocurrency data provider.

The value of a single coin rose to $0.05204 that Thursday morning, up by almost three cents in 24 hours. The volume of trading more than tripled over the course of the day.

Clearly, Musk noticed the activity that his first tweet caused, and it didn’t take long before he began leaning into the attention with memes and more endorsements of Dogecoin. (And, yes, that is Musk’s face photoshopped into The Lion King.)

However, it should be noted that Musk tweeted about Dogecoin last weekend, which saw the price rise before dropping sharply. So as with any investment, buyer beware.

(Via The Guardian)