Dogecoin price surges on Elon Musk’s Tesla merchandise announcement
Tesla supremo Elon Musk sent the price of Dogecoin rocketing today after announcing the company would be accepting Doge as a means of payment for merchandise.
The 50-year-old billionaire took to Twitter to tell his 66.3 million followers about the move and, within minutes, Dogecoin leapt from $0.16 to $0.20.
The meme coin – first created as a joke in 2014 – had been languishing in its lower reaches alongside almost every other digital asset this week as the cryptocurrency markets suffer a slump.
Musk has previous form in moving the price of cryptocurrencies.
Earlier this year he tweeted that Tesla would accept Bitcoin as payment for its vehicles, before backtracking and shunning the flagship cryptocurrency over environmental concerns surrounding the energy impact of Bitcoin mining.
His first announcement gave the price of Bitcoin an enormous boost, but the subsequent u-turn saw it tumble back to $52,000.
Following his apparent hissy-fit over Bitcoin’s poor environmental track record, he then began plugging Dogecoin to all and sundry. Investor expectations were high ahead of his Saturday Night Live hosting debut in May, but the price of Doge quickly fell when he failed to mention his love for the altcoin.
It led Dogecoin inventor Jackson Palmer to brand the South African businessman as “self absorbed grifter”.