Musk tweets Tesla to accept Dogecoin for swag
A day after being named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the electric car company will make merchandise buyable with Dogecoin “and see how it goes.” The cryptocurrency rose 31% immediately after the tweet.
Fast facts
- Within two hours of his 5:34 a.m. ET tweet, the price of Dogecoin rose from 16 US cents to 21 US cents with volume increasing 250% from US$995 million to US$3.5 billion, according to Coingecko.
- Elon Musk has a long history of supporting Dogecoin by tweet, and even getting chastised by others in the crypto community for cheerleading a meme coin — initially produced as a satire — over established coins like Bitcoin.
- Earlier this year, Musk announced Tesla would accept Bitcoin for payment and then retracted his statement when it was criticized as hypocritical since Tesla is a green company fighting climate change while Bitcoin requires tremendous energy to mine.