Dogecoin Surges as Elon Musk Teases Tesla Merchandise Plan
Tesla experimented with bitcoin payments for its electric cars earlier this year.
Dec 14, 2021 at 10:58 a.m. UTCUpdated May 11, 2023 at 4:06 p.m. UTC
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Dogecoin surged as much as 33% after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric-car maker would accept dogecoin as payment for its merchandise.
- “Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” Musk tweeted.
- Dogecoin rose to as high as $0.20 following Musk’s tweet, before falling back to about $0.18.
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- Musk, who was yesterday named Time magazine’s person of the year, has previously lent support to dogecoin development and adoption even as the memecoin’s creators abandoned the project back in 2015.
- Earlier this year, Tesla started accepting bitcoin as payment for its electric cars. The pilot proved short-lived amid rising concerns about Bitcoin’s energy usage and was soon dropped.
- Musk has tweeted regularly about dogecoin. In February he posted a picture of a rocket next to the moon. He followed that post with a one-word tweet stating “Doge” – a play on the saying of “going to the moon,” a term for an asset-price surge. The same month he posted an edited picture from “The Lion King,” with himself as Rafiki and a Shiba Inu as Simba. Dogecoin prices jumped again.
- A May tweet saw Musk state he was working with dogecoin developers to improve system efficiency. It sent dogecoin prices flying by 22%. Then in June, he tweeted it was “important to support” a proposal that sought to reduce dogecoin fees – one that would make dogecoin more competitive compared to other cryptocurrencies.
- Still, Musk does not see the crypto sector succeeding as many crypto fanatics otherwise do. In a recent interview after being named Time’s Person of The Year for 2021, Musk said he “doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency.”
UPDATE (Dec. 13, 11:00 UTC): Adds tweet.
UPDATE (Dec. 13, 11:48 UTC): Replaces tweet with dogecoin price graph, adds history on previous tweets.
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Shaurya is the Deputy Managing Editor for the Data & Tokens team, focusing on decentralized finance, markets, on-chain data, and governance across all major and minor blockchains.