Elon Musk has been hyping cryptocurrencies for years, especially the meme crypto, dogecoin, which often spikes on his comments, but on Tuesday the world’s richest man reversed course, saying he never recommended anyone buy cryptocurrencies. His comments came, of course, after a brutal second round of selloffs during the “crypto winter” of 2022.
“I have never said that people should invest in crypto,” Musk said in an interview with Bloomberg at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday.
There is one particular crypto he likes, he clarified.
“I intend to personally support dogecoin because I just know a lot of people who are not that wealthy who have encouraged me to buy and support dogecoin, so I’m responding to those people,” Musk said during at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday.
Last year, Musk branded himself the “dogefather” in a reference to the coin, and he said on Tuesday that people who work around factories at his companies SpaceX and Tesla have asked him to support it.
Musk reiterated that Tesla supports dogecoin for some merchandise and that SpaceX will soon do the same.
Among Musk’s many crypto-related tweets in the past year, he’s posted about setting up a dogecoin mining rig with his kids and said that “SpaceX is going to put a literal dogecoin on the literal moon.”
In advance of Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live last year, dogecoin reached a record high of 73 cents as fans of the cryptocurrency speculated that he might mention the crypto during the show. After he called the cryptocurrency a “hustle” during the show, dogecoin fell about 30%.
Despite it being down 64% year to date, any mention of dogecoin by Musk has been known to correlate with a jump in the cryptocurrency’s price, and Tuesday was no exception. Following Bloomberg’s interview with him, dogecoin jumped about 11%, trading at 0.067 cents as of Tuesday afternoon.
On Sunday, Musk tweeted “I will keep supporting Dogecoin” to his 99 million followers, garnering more than 300,000 likes. Just minutes later, one Twitter user replied to Musk’s tweet saying “keep buying it then,” to which Musk replied that he was. Musk’s tweets correlated with an 11.7% increase in dogecoin’s price starting at around 2 a.m. on Sunday.
While the two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ether, have struggled over the past week as a broad selloff erased trillions of dollars from the crypto market, dogecoin has jumped in value. While Bitcoin and Ether are down 5.3% and 5.42% respectively over the past seven days, dogecoin is up 21%, according to CoinMarketCap.
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