Where is the Doge craze on Twitter headed?
Elon Musk replaces Twitter's logo with the memecoin.
Elon Musk replaces the Twitter logo with the memecoin. A joke - or is there more to it?
Anyone opening Twitter this morning was suddenly greeted by Kabosu, perhaps the internet's most famous Shiba Inu. Elon Musk has replaced Twitter's logo with Dogecoin's. The price of Dogecoin jumped by almost 30%. The whole world is wondering: what's this all about?
Musk has stayed quiet. Instead, he posted a funny meme. A police officer checks a butterfly with a skull. The Twitter logo is still on his ID card. The caption: "This is an old photo." The suggestion to do the action came from a user named Chairman on March 28: "Buy Twitter. And change the logo to Doge." To which Elon Musk replied: "View post on X."
A question from Quartz to Twitter's communications department confirmed this with a laughing poop emoji. Is there more to it? Elon Musk wants to turn the platform into a payments service. Dogecoin is also repeatedly touted as a possible currency.
The billionaire is known for his Dogecoin stunts: over the years he drew attention with hype tweets like "Dogecoin Rulz" or "no highs, no lows, just Doge". In 2021 he even urged people on Saturday Night Live to invest in Doge. A year later he proclaimed on Twitter that he would eat a Happy Meal on TV if McDonald’s accepts Doge in return.
Dogecoin surged by 36,000 percent.
Because of these and other moves, Elon Musk is being criticized. Investors say he artificially pumped the Doge price by more than 36,000%, only to let it crash. His lawyer sees it differently: "There is nothing illegal about tweeting support or funny photos about a legitimate cryptocurrency that still has a market cap of nearly $10 billion."
Due to its low transaction costs and high speed, Dogecoin is seen by many as the "Bitcoin for microtransactions". The project actually started as a joke in 2013. Each year five billion new coins are generated, which over time greatly expands the supply.
Twitter has lost half its value since Musk took over and is now valued at around $20 billion. Not much more than Doge.
