How Musk's tweets changed the course of Dogecoin's price

The Tesla CEO has been responsible for some of the cryptocurrency's biggest spikes

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and one of the richest people in the world, holds a special place in the internet meme economy. The broad sentiment around him, particularly concerning cryptocurrencies, is either "Elon no" or "Elon yes", depending on his tweets on the latest coin news.

One look at the multibillionaire's Twitter feed shows a serious case of tumbleweeds when it comes to cryptocurrencies. He has, at times, supported Bitcoin and ETH, while at other times, he said things like "BTC & ETH do seem high lol", resulting in a terrified Twitterati asking him to delete the tweets for fear of the markets crashing.

But what is it with him and Dogecoin, the internet's new favourite meme currency?

The Tesla CEO recently tweeted "Dojo 4 Doge", sending the currency to a whopping $0.056, reaching a 24-hour high of $0.059 just hours after his tweet. It then proceeded to normalise, falling to $0.050, according to Coinbase.

Dojo refers to a neural network training computer being developed by Tesla to process visual data.

Read | Elon Musk says he supports top dogecoin holders selling most of their coins

This is, of course, is not the first time Musk's tweets have caused Dogecoin, the Shiba inu-themed currency, to spike.

In December, Musk tweeted “One word: Doge” sending the cryptocurrency to a 20 per cent surge.

Before that, he tweeted a meme using the "Dust Storm Dog" template, which led the meme coin to jump 14 per cent.

Musk's greatest contribution to the meme currency, however, is likely to stand at the faux magazine cover he posted on January 29, when the coin jumped a whopping 420 per cent to reach $0.038 from a paltry $0.007.