Elon Musk Reiterates Support for Dogecoin at Qatar Economic Forum

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reiterated his support for meme coin cryptocurrency Dogecoin, albeit evasively, at this year’s Qatar Economic Forum in Doha.

“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,” he said, in a video interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. 

Musk claimed in the interview that it was his own employees who asked him to champion Dogecoin, or in his words: “just people when I walk around the factory at SpaceX or Tesla, they've asked me to support Dogecoin, so I'm doing so.” 

Musk, who has a net worth of well over a fifth of a trillion dollars, was this year estimated to be the richest man in the world by Forbes. He has said he personally owns Dogecoin, and his Twitter pronouncements on the cryptocurrency have often pumped its price. Earlier this year, he announced that both Tesla and SpaceX will accept Dogecoin payments for some merchandise.

This week, Bloomberg reported that Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX are facing a $258 billion lawsuit, which alleges that Musk was part of a racketeering scheme to back the cryptocurrency.

"I have never said that people should invest in crypto," Musk said at the Qatar Economic Forum. He added that, "SpaceX and Tesla and myself did all buy some Bitcoin, but it's a small percentage of our total cash assets, so not all that significant."

Twitter: Will he? Won’t he?

Crypto fans have keenly followed Musk’s on-again-off-again bid to buy Twitter this year. Musk has openly said that should the deal be finalized, he would likely “integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth,” adding that this would include, "currency as well as crypto."

In April, Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion takeover bid, but the CEO appears to have gotten cold feet for the time being. The following month he said the deal was "temporarily on hold" until he could verify that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were fake. 

Musk confirmed at the Qatar Economic Forum that there are still “unresolved matters” on the deal. Twitter responded to his concerns earlier this month by giving him access to a "firehose" of data including every tweet posted on the platform, so he can independently verify the extent of bot activity.

Musk also told the Qatar Forum that even if the deal falls through, he will continue “driving the product” at Twitter, though what form his input will take is anyone’s guess. 

In any case, he will certainly tweet about it.