Elon Musk broke his very short Twitter on Thursday with a series of tweets early in the morning that raised the price of a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke.
The dogecoin inspired by memes grew around 3:30, after the billionaire chief Tesla fired a series of light posts announcing it. It recently traded down about 41 percent to about 4.6 cents a piece after rising to nearly 6 cents overnight, according to CoinDesk.
After sharing videos with the launch of a SpaceX rocket, Musk seemed to enjoy his ability to move alone with the price of Dogecoin, which is named for an internet meme with a shiba inu dog.
One of Musk’s tweets was featured a picture with his photoshopped face on Rafiki from “The Lion King” raising a baby Simba with a “doge” face.
“I welcome you,” Musk wrote in the post, which he did just two days after announcing he would be leaving Twitter for an indefinite period.
“Off Twitter for a while,” Musk wrote on Twitter Tuesday following a series of moving tweets on the market that affected not only the price of Bitcoin and Etsy, but also the medical device company Signal Advance, even though his tweet seemed to refer to the Signal messaging application, not to the company similarly named medical.
Musk also helped grow Dogecoin last week tweeting a fake cover of the magazine for “Dogue,” a dog-themed Vogue reference. A Reddit forum focused on cryptocurrencies saw this as a signal that Musk was supporting his efforts to raise the price of the currency.
While some crypto traders seem to take it seriously, Musk reportedly said this week that his Dogecoin posts are “really just meant to be jokes.”
“Probably the most fun and ironic result would be that dogecoin will become the currency of the earth in the future,” Musk said in the Clubhouse audio-chat app, according to Newsweek.