9 Elon Musk tweets that moved the crypto markets
Elon Musk’s short posts about crypto have delivered double-digit gains for Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and SHIBA INU on multiple occasions. How many do you remember?
X (still referred to as Twitter by practically everyone) has long established itself as one of the most important social networks for the crypto community.
As well as giving early adopters an opportunity to interact with each other, it’s allowed Bitcoin and Ether to burst through into mainstream consciousness.
Barely a day goes by when a crypto term isn’t trending on the platform — and at the time of writing, unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of buzz about #HAMSTERKOMBAT.
Meanwhile, Spaces became a popular forum for in-depth conversations about the values that underpin the industry… and they’ve often attracted some pretty big names.
There have also been times when the posts (ahem, tweets) have had a huge and sudden impact on the crypto markets… and not always in a good way.
You’ll be unsurprised to hear that most of them came from one man — Elon Musk — who avidly posted about digital assets until a few years ago. Of course, he now owns X.
Bitomat recently released research that delved into the tweets that had the most impact, and it’s a pretty good history lesson on the wild journey that cryptocurrencies have been on so far.
Who knew three little words could make such a huge difference?
Dogecoin, then a relatively niche memecoin, doubled to $0.004 over the days that followed this post in December 2020.
DOGE was on the brink of an incredible bull run that would see its price peak at $0.7376 — and incidentally, the top was reached when Musk called it a “hustle” on Saturday Night Live.
Someone who gained exposure to this altcoin at the time of this post would have ended up making a cool $184 for every $1 invested.
It remains one of the biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization to this very day.
OK, so not a tweet we admit — but it happened on Twitter, so that counts for something.
Musk quietly added #bitcoin to his bio in January 2021, and once it was noticed by Bitcoiners, it had a huge impact on the value of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency.
A surge from $32,000 to beyond $38,000 — almost 20% — happened in a few hours. Such sudden and substantial increases are pretty rare these days.
Just like Bitcoin’s volatility can work both ways, so can Musk’s posts.
The billionaire spooked the markets when he announced that Tesla would no longer be accepting Bitcoin amid concerns about its energy use and carbon emissions.
It led to a stomach-churning 19% drop in BTC’s value, from $58,000 to $47,000.
Musk was arguably DOGE’s biggest booster in 2021.
This post delivered in February of that year another 50% bump — from $0.04 to $0.06 — and garnered a cool 100,000 retweets.
How many people do you think saw that and learned about Dogecoin for the first time?
Sometimes, he ended up moving the markets in pretty unpredictable ways.
Dogecoin’s success sparked a rush to create several smaller memecoins — and one of them was Shiba Inu, the breed of Kabosu, who was the original Doge.
SHIB ended up tripling in value off the back of five little words and a hashtag. Even now, it remains the 11th-biggest cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap that far exceeds some established companies.
DOGE rallied by 43% off the back of this post alone in December 2021, with Musk adding a previously lacking layer of utility by accepting it as a payment method.
There was a similar effect and a bump of 78% when Mark Cuban acknowledged its low transaction fees in a tweet two months later.
All of these tweets came within four weeks of each other — and undoubtedly played an instrumental role in DOGE’s unlikely rally to a market cap that even (temporarily) exceeded some of the world’s oldest banks.
Each delivered double-digit gains — with “no highs, no lows, only Doge” doing particularly well and securing a 50% bump.
But as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. DOGE is now trading at 82% below the all-time high set in May 2021, and has failed to ignite during the current bull run.
And in a sign that his posts had lasting consequences, a group of investors later sued him for a jaw-dropping $258 billion — accusing him of using “his pedestal as the world’s richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin pyramid scheme.”
His lawyers continue to battle to get the lawsuit thrown out.
