Elon Musk Tells All About Financing Doge as $DOGE Price Goes Green
Walter Isaacson wrote a biography about Elon Musk showing his long-term support for Dogecoin | Credit: Shutterstock
Key Takeaways
- Musk’s biography details his dream of creating “a new blockchain-based social-media platform.”
- Dogecoin was always at the center of Elon Musk’s X.com project.
- Musk saw Twitter as a “booster to launch X.com.”
A WSJ article provided an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk. It delves into Musk’s character, his management of SpaceX and Tesla, and crucial information about his takeover of Twitter at the time.
The article underscores Elon Musk’s desire to resurrect X.com, his original payment solutions firm, which later became PayPal through a merger with Peter Thiel’s payment service, originally named Cofinity.
The biography tells the story of how the tech billionaire always wanted to create “a new social-media platform based on the blockchain”.
Ironically, the notion of featuring Dogecoin, Musk’s favorite memecoin, on his new financial platform originated from a joke by his brother, Kimbal.
The biography reveals Musk’s secret funding of Dogecoin’s development, shedding light on his fascination with the token and his decision to include it in the Twitter-to-X rebrand announcement.
Elon’s Doge
Musk’s involvement with cryptocurrencies has been marked by turbulence. In 2021, he and Tesla made a significant $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin, causing a market frenzy that attracted investors and resulted in a $3,000 overnight surge in the token’s value.
Not too long after, Musk tweeted that the company “has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”
He added that “cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”
Two years before that, Musk started showing interest in Dogecoin, a memecoin built as a fork of Litecoin.
The tech billionaire’s fascination for Dogecoin continued and even grew. His troll-like tweets started to include the mention of Dogecoin more and more often.
He even went as far as calling himself “The Dogefather” in a tweet promoting his appearance on Saturday Night Live in 2021.
Elon’s support became official during his interview with Time magazine as he was named Time’s 2021 Person Of The Year.
Musk’s overt endorsement of the memecoin became clear on April 3rd when he replaced the Twitter blue bird logo with the Doge symbol, a move acknowledged by Dogecoin’s official account with the tweet “Very currency Wow Much Coin How Money So Crypto”.
And, to hit the final nail in the coffin, Elon added the Dogecoin “Đ” symbol to his profile as he announced the platform’s rebranding into X, which resulted in a 9% jump for the token.
The State Of Doge
As things stand, Dogecoin is valued at ~$1.9. Elon’s Tesla also allows customers to use Dogecoin to make purchases on the website.
But, most importantly, Elon’s X recently received a license to operate as a crypto exchange, a move likely to bring more crypto enthusiasts to the platform, and even more likely to boost Dogecoin’s popularity and value.
In the meantime, Musk is still very present on his own social platform, responding to users who criticize crypto and its future.
