By Ekin Genç
3 min read
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who can influence Dogecoin’s price with his tweets, warned his Twitter followers against overinvesting in crypto—a day before he’s expected to air a skit about the coin on Saturday Night Live.
“Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution!” Musk tweeted. Dogecoin rose from $0.57 to $0.59 immediately after the tweet. It now trades for $0.62.
Attached to Musk’s tweet is a video interview that online media outlet TMZ published in February.
In the video, Musk told a gaggle of eager reporters and fans, “People should not invest their life savings in cryptocurrency. That’s unwise.”
Musk then expressed his support for crypto: “If you want to speculate, maybe have some fun—there's a good chance crypto is the future currency of the earth.”
He said that Dogecoin’s success depends on “the will of the people.”
Then one fan blurted out: “My Dogecoin went up when you tweeted. You’re amazing, how do you do it? The power—the power of Elon Musk!”
The coin’s most ardent fans, the so-called Dogecoin Army, are set on sending Dogecoin “to the moon”—or at least a price of $1.
Musk’s tweet came a day before his debut on Saturday Night Live. Speculators await the promised Dogecoin skit with bated breath, in hopes that it could send the coin’s price skyward.
Dogecoin jumped 15% when Musk announced he was hosting the comedy show, and set an all-time high of $0.69 two days ago in anticipation. Investors had targeted the price on the so-called Doge Day of April 20 (4/20).
Bolstered in part by Musk’s tweets, Dogecoin has risen by 104% this past week, 867% in the past month and 24,738% in the past year.
Among those who share Dogecoin investors’ ambitions is Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur whose NBA team, the Dallas Mavericks, accepts and holds Dogecoin. At yesterday’s Ethereal Summit, hosted by Decrypt, Cuban predicted that Dogecoin will hit $1 and become a stablecoin.
Stablecoins usually refer to cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the price of a fiat currency, such as the US dollar. However, Cuban most likely used the term to suggest that Dogecoin’s price will stabilize at around $1.
Not everyone shares Cuban’s excitement. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of the seventh-largest cryptocurrency, Cardano, fears that Dogecoin threatens the cryptocurrency market.
“Are they purchasing that because they intend on using it for something? Or are they purchasing that because they want to get a 10x?” Hoskinson said in a YouTube video on Wednesday.
He warned that the speculative mentality will turn crypto into what comedian Bill Maher or Berkshire Hathaway vice chair Charlie Munger think it is: a useless speculative asset.
Dogecoin’s developers, after all, built the coin to mock cryptocurrencies. But this week, it became the third largest cryptocurrency when it hit a market capitalization of $79 billion.
“Fate loves irony,” said Musk in the video he shared today.
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