Dogecoin Was Up 9% on News Elon Musk Took a 9.2% Stake in Twitter

Musk recently suggested he may launch a new social media site fueled by his favorite crypto — Dogecoin. Now, he’s Twitter’s largest shareholder.

Key points

• Bloomberg reported Monday that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has become the largest individual shareholder of Twitter.
• Musk recently polled his 80 million Twitter followers if they thought Twitter supported free speech.
• He suggested possibly launching a new social media website that would be fueled by Dogecoin (DOGE).
• DOGE surged as much as 9% on the news.

As Bloomberg first reported, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has acquired a 9.2% stake in social media giant Twitter — making him the largest individual shareholder of Twitter based on SEC filings dated March 14, 2022. Over the past two weeks before that filing became public, Musk polled his 80 million Twitter followers if they thought Twitter supported free speech and 70% responded “no.”

As a result, Musk suggested launching a new social media website that would be fueled by his favorite cryptocurrency — Dogecoin (DOGE). Following the Bloomberg article, DOGE surged as high as 9% — possibly on the prospect that Musk may try to create more use cases for DOGE via the Twitter platform.

Could Dogecoin be the official crypto of Twitter?

While it’s completely speculative whether Musk tries to flex his newly acquired shareholder muscle on Twitter developers to adopt DOGE as the official crypto of Twitter — it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. The billionaire has been a long time, ardent supporter of DOGE as a legitimate, and preferred form of cryptocurrency payment.

During an interview for a TIME feature article posted last December, Musk said that Dogecoin was a superior form of digital payment compared to Bitcoin, which has the largest market valuation of any crypto and is more than 40 times the market value of DOGE, according to CoinMarketCap.

“Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow — transactions per day — that you can do with Dogecoin has much higher potential than Bitcoin. It [Dogecoin] is slightly inflationary, but that inflationary number is a fixed number as opposed to a percentage. Which means that over time, its percentage of inflation decreases. That’s actually good because it encourages people to spend it rather than hoard [Dogecoin] as a store of value,” Musk was quoted as saying in the TIME article.

Specific use cases of DOGE for Twitter could be the creation of a Dogecoin-centered wallet or full-blown payment platform that could be free to Twitter users. Let’s not forget that Musk originally was a cofounder of PayPal, so he knows something about digital payments. He may tap that expertise to “suggest” some ideas to senior Twitter executives — or maybe not. Regardless, Twitter has 436 million unique users per month, ranking it No.15 in social networking sites based on its global traffic, according to Statista.com.

Should you buy?

At the time of writing, DOGE had retraced a bit off the Musk announcement, but was still up 5.02% at $0.155 per coin, while the broader crypto market was down 0.80%, according to CoinMarketCap. But it’s down 79% from its all-time high of $ 0.74 in May 2021.

This discussion is not financial advice but is instead my personal opinion. Investors should only use funds they can afford to lose and should always do their own research. However, this was an unexpected bit of news from the self-proclaimed “Doge Father” who may have some plans to jumpstart the stalled Dogecoin project using a widely-adopted social media platform.