‘Why People Love Dogecoin’—Elon Musk Reveals One Surprise Reason Behind His Support For The ‘Joke’ Bitcoin Rival Amid Crypto Price Crash

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has repeatedly given his support to the meme-based bitcoin rival dogecoin over the last few years—helping its price to soar while mocking legendary investor Warren Buffett.

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The dogecoin price has, however, crashed dramatically from its 2021 peak, falling along with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a brutal crypto crash sparks fears of a “price spiral.”

Now, Elon Musk, who has increasingly become embroiled in Twitter rows since his bid to take the company private was announced in April, has revealed one reason he thinks “people love dogecoin.”

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“Billy’s sense of humor and irreverence is a big part of why people love dogecoin,” Musk posted to Twitter, replying to dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus after dogecoin’s other co-creator, Jackson Palmer, launched a scathing attack on Musk, accusing him of being a “grifter.”

“Palmer always forgets to mention that he never wrote a single line of dogecoin code,” Musk shot back, with Markus adding, “the people after us did exponentially more than either Jackson or I did on the code base.” Markus and Palmer created dogecoin, which is loosly based on a fork of bitcoin, as “a joke” that used the doge meme as inspiration.

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Through early 2021 dogecoin attracted huge attention, helped on by Musk and other high-profile backers such as billionaire Mark Cuban, becoming a top ten cryptocurrency as traders piled into the memecoin. It reached a market capitalization of almost $90 billion in early May 2021. The dogecoin price has since crashed back, with its market cap falling to under $10 billion.

This week, Palmer, an outspoken crypto critic, lashed out against the crypto space, saying he thought it “would implode a bit more quickly and people would learn their lesson.”

Palmer, speaking to Australia’s Crikey to promote his new Griftonomics podcast, said he wishes “it was the end of crypto, but it’s not,” and that “increasingly people are doing nothing but making money off doing nothing, it’s kind of fucked us all up.”

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Palmer also said he messaged Musk via Twitter years ago with details of a code script he claimed could detect and automatically report Twitter cryptocurrency scams. “It became apparent very quickly that [Musk] didn’t understand coding as well as he made out,” Palmer said.

Musk has repeatedly railed against Twitter bots and crypto scams on the platform, accusing Twitter of underplaying the number of fake accounts and putting his bid to take the company private “temporarily on hold” until Twitter provides evidence of its assertion that fewer than 5% of its users were spam or fake accounts.

Last week, Musk announced his rocket company SpaceX will follow Tesla in accepting dogecoin for merchandise, temporariliy boosting the dogecoin price. Tesla began accepting dogecoin for merchandise purchases in January.

Tesla last year briefly began accepting bitcoin for car purchases but Musk pulled the plug just two months later, blaming bitcoin’s high energy demands and carbon footprint. Musk went onto say Tesla would most likely restart accepting bitcoin though it hasn’t done so yet.