Was it a delayed April Fools’ Day prank, a trolling response to Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit, or a sign Twitter would integrate the OG joke cryptocurrency?
These were among the countless questions ricocheting around the Twitter-sphere after the social media platform’s blue bird icon was replaced by Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu logo on April 3.
The confusion was hardly dispelled by Elon Musk’s explanation for the change, a tweet that read,
“As promised,” accompanied by a screenshot of his 2022 conversation with a user who suggested flipping the bird in favor of Doge.
Dogecoin chimed in by tweeting: “Very currency. Wow. Many coins. How Money. So Crypto.”
So what is it with this new change in tune from Elon Musk and his blatant disregard for any culture laws installed by the former Twitter regime? Well, let’s get down to the bottom of this, Scooby.
Twitter Logo Change Spikes Price of Dogecoin
Let’s talk about the price of Dogecoin after Elon decided to switch things up at Twitter … Irrespective of the thinking behind the move (or lack thereof), the price of Dogecoin spiked dramatically from $0.077 on April 3 to $0.090 at the time of writing. It’s a 16 percent increase that represents the coin’s highest value in nearly six months.
Despite these gains, Dogecoin is still trading 86 percent below its 2021 peak. Musk has been a tongue-in-cheek booster of Dogecoin for several years, and it featured prominently in the Saturday Night Live he hosted in 2021.
Since first tweeting about Dogecoin in April 2019, the coin’s value has increased by 2,547 percent.
Aside from the market volatility sparked by the elevated presence of the Shiba Inu on social media, it renewed discussions that Dogecoin was on track to finding a place in Twitter’s future.
This is extremely unlikely. Dogecoin, a clone of Bitcoin that was released as a joke in 2013, is a proof-of-work coin (read: really bad for the environment) with slow transaction speeds and ultimately little utility for Twitter.
Dogecoin Price Was Driven Up, Even Though It Was a Joke
Another theory is that Musk is trolling the plaintiffs who have brought a $ 258 billion racketeering lawsuit against him. The lawsuit brought by Dogecoin investors accuses Musk of running a pyramid scheme and using his position of influence to drive up the price of Dogecoin and then letting it crash.
On March 31, days before Twitter’s image change, Musk asked a U.S. judge to throw out the case, labeling it a “fanciful work of fiction.”
Suspicious much? We believe so…
Musk appeared to follow through on another one of his pet jokes on April 5 when the ‘W’ on the sign of Twitter’s headquarters was covered, a reference to a poll Musk took in April 2022 that asked if he should “delete the ‘w’ in Twitter?”
Just as a reminder, Twitter was bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in October of last year. With a large amount of the money used to purchase Twitter comes from financing, aka leverage.
So unless Twitter does something extreme and somehow manages to make the once-great social media giant profitable… we might just be looking at the very end of Twitter.
That’s right, folks, this may be the end. Or this might all lead to something greater than we cannot perceive or foresee. Maybe, just maybe, Elon will be the impetus for crypto and social media finally becoming one holy technological being. Only time will, dear reader.
