Elon Musk is one of the few people who can make people rich with a single tweet.
On Tuesday, Time’s newly crowned Person of the Year tweeted that “Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” ultimately causing the Dogecoin cryptocurrency to soar 33%, according to Bloomberg. The announcement brought Doge up to $0.20, before the spike wore off and it landed at $0.18 soon after.
This isn’t the first time that Elon has impacted the fate of Doge, which was inspired by a Japanese Shiba Inu dog meme back in 2013. When the Tesla giant hosted Saturday Night Live back in May, the currency plummeted nearly 40% after his hosting gig, Forbes initially reported. Musk mentioned the coin during his opening monologue and also during “Weekend Update,” painting it in a negative light.
In his recent TIME interview, Musk spoke candidly about Doge, and how he as a co-founder of PayPal has knowledge of money and the mechanics of it, sharing that there are “very few people” who have a better understanding of it than him.
“Fundamentally, Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency,” he said. “Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow that you could do with Dogecoin is substantially more than, like transactions-per-day, has much higher potential than Bitcoin. It is slightly inflationary, but that inflation rate number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. So that means, over time, it’s percentage of inflation actually decreases. And that’s actually good because it encourages people to spend rather than hoard it.”
