On Friday, the 27th of May 2022, Elon Musk dropped another tweet that sent the price of Dogecoin soaring for a couple of hours. He tweeted that official Tesla merchandise could now be purchased using Dogecoin and that SpaceX would also follow suit soon after. “Tesla merch can be bought with DOGE, soon Spacex merch too,” read the tweet.

After his tweet, Dogecoin prices spiked from USD 0.078 to an intra-day high of USD 0.085 – registering a jump of 9 percent in minutes. After the announcement, Dogecoin’s market capitalisation also catapulted from USD 10.35 billion to USD 11.33 billion. However, the meme coin could not sustain the price level and fell to USD 0.08 before rebounding to USD 0.084 at the time of writing.

Besides the Tesla & SpaceX announcement, Musk also made an interesting revelation regarding Starlink subscriptions. When enthusiasts asked if users could pay for the satellite internet service using dogecoin, the Tesla chief responded with “Maybe one day,” hinting that it is definitely a possibility.

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This is not the first time that Musk has stimulated large price movements. The Tesla boss has always been a Dogecoin evangelist, and his tweets have invariably stirred some sizable price actions for the meme coin. On 14th January 2022, Tesla started accepting Dogecoin as a mode of payment on select merchandise. Following Musk’s tweet that day, Dogecoin skyrocketed by 10 percent to reach a high of USD 0.2.

However, like the rest of the cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin has also been reeling under the effects of the Crypto Winter. Over the last year, the token peaked at USD 0.42 when Coinbase Pro allowed users to start trading the cryptocurrency on its platform back in June 2021. At the time, Dogecoin touched a market capitalisation of USD 55 billion and topped the market capitalisations of Ferrari, Twitter, and Deutsche Bank. However, it has been sliding down since and hasn’t been able to gather enough steam.

Owing to his influence over the meme coin’s price action, Musk has been nicknamed ‘Dogefather’ in the crypto world. Earlier this month, he said that, while Dogecoin could very well become a transactable currency, Bitcoin was more like a store of value. He has also previously revealed that his own crypto holdings include Bitcoin, Ether, and Dogecoin. However, SpaceX only holds Bitcoin currently.

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As the richest man in the world with a net worth of USD 219 billion, if Musk moves as much as a muscle, the world reacts. Although he is almost always in the limelight for his tweets that trigger worldwide speculation, Musk is currently under the spotlight for his USD 44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

Most recently, he tweeted a cartoon of himself freeing a bird that looks like the Twitter logo from its cage. However, since his Twitter acquisition on 14th April 2022, the social media giant’s stock has plummeted by 11 percent, while that of Tesla has sunk by 22.8 percent.

(Edited by : Priyanka Deshpande)

First Published:May 30, 2022 1:25 PM IST