Dogecoin Pumps As Elon Musk Says Tesla ‘Should Enable’ Purchases With Meme Coin

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk hasn’t forgotten about Dogecoin. 

During a visit to a Tesla plant near Berlin today, the world’s third richest person was asked if the electric car giant would accept the asset as payment for vehicles. 

In a video widely shared on Twitter, Musk said that it was something he’d like the tech company to do.

“At some point, I think we should enable that,” Musk said. “Dogecoin to the moon.” 

He told the crowd in Germany that he started pumping the cryptocurrency after some “regular guys” at Tesla and SpaceX factories told him to support the asset. “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto, so I will support it,” he added. 

Tesla already accepts Dogecoin for merchandise, and you can use Bitcoin to buy a car from the company. 

Dogecoin—DOGE—is the 10th biggest digital asset by market cap and was originally created as a joke by developers who wanted to make fun of Bitcoin. Its logo is a Shiba Inu dog meme once widely shared on the Internet. 

But back in 2020, Musk started tweeting about the coin, and its price rocketed. It now has a market cap of more than $25 billion. 

Dogecoin developers told Decrypt in 2021 that they had been working with the billionaire to improve the cryptocurrency and make it widely accepted for payments. 

Dogecoin’s price jumped on Musk’s comments, and was earlier today trading for $0.18, CoinGecko data shows. It has since dropped to $0.17 but is still up 4% over the past 24 hours. Over the past 30 days, it’s up over 115%. 

Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in 2021. It then sold a large portion of its holdings and said it wouldn’t accept it for payments. 

Then, Tesla started accepting the virtual coin again, and the company is among the largest corporate holders of the asset, with 9,720 digital coins—over $684 million at today’s prices.

MicroStrategy, headed by Michael Saylor, holds over 200,000 Bitcoin.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.