By Tim Hakki
3 min read
To decide the future currency of our planet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave his 45.6 million Twitter followers two choices today: ‘Dogecoin to the Moooonn’ or ‘All other crypto combined’.
The internet decided swiftly. At the time of writing, Dogecoin holds 70.5% of the votes. And just eight minutes after the tweet, Dogecoin reached a 24-hour high of $0.050681: a 12.16% increase.
On Tuesday, Musk announced he would be “Off Twitter for a while.” But on Thursday, Musk returned, tweeting ‘ur welcome’ with a picture of himself as Rafiki from the Lion King, holding up the Shiba Inu meme—the mascot of Dogecoin—in place of Simba on the clifftop above the promised land. It was a return that proved profitable for DOGE holders, as the coin rose over 40% in the following half an hour from $0.039 to a price of $0.057.
The next day, KISS bassist and Rock School tutor Gene Simmons took Musk’s tweet as an opportunity to disclose how he purchased more Dogecoin to supplement the DOGE and XRP already in his portfolio. Simmons tweeted yesterday that he just bought more than $100,000 worth of the coin. Fifteen minutes later, the price began to go down, dropping over 4% from a price of $0.047 to $0.045.
It doesn’t look like the DOGE is as fond of Gene as it is of Elon.
The surges and dips in price following tweets by celebrities are a sobering reminder of the volatile and whimsical nature of the crypto markets, which can and do get inordinate influence from figures like Elon Musk. A study released earlier this year by the Blockchain Research Lab concluded that the correlation between BTC and DOGE price surges was directly caused by Elon Musk’s tweets.
Elon’s been very vocal about crypto lately. The one-time Bitcoin skeptic came out in March 2020 as a supporter of Dogecoin. Then, in a sudden turn last week, he updated his Twitter bio to say one word: Bitcoin. He since deleted that bio, but the sudden upsurge of interest in the coin ended up straining crypto exchanges like Binance.
Musk’s Twitter has brought Bitcoin and Dogecoin noticeable increases before, intensifying the debate about just how susceptible cryptocurrencies are to manipulation, in this case from celebrity co-signs.
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