‘New CEO’—Elon Musk Teases Twitter Shake-Up, Sending The Price Of Bitcoin Rival Dogecoin Soaring
Twitter owner Elon Musk, whose fickle support of the meme-based bitcoin rival dogecoin has waned recently, has again sent its price sharply higher.
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Musk teased Twitter users with images of his dog Floki—the shiba inu breed used by dogecoin—as the social media company’s “new CEO,” rekindling hopes among long-suffering dogecoin holders that Musk could integrate the cryptocurrency into the platform.
The dogecoin price moved sharply higher following Musk’s tongue-in-cheek posts though it remains far below the Musk-hype-fueled levels it reached in May 2021 after crashing along with the bitcoin price and other major cryptocurrencies.
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Twitter owner and Tesla billionaire Elon Musk spoke via video link at the World Government Summit in … [+] Dubai on February 15 about his search for a new Twitter chief executive.
AFP via Getty Images
“The new CEO of Twitter is amazing,” Musk posted to Twitter alongside an image of his dog Floki. “He is perfect,” Musk replied to dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who quipped: “I guess he was the only one crazy enough to take the job.”
Floki is “better than that other guy,” Musk said, seemingly referring to former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who Musk fired after buying the company in late October.
Musk began the search for a new Twitter CEO in December after a Twitter poll resulted in users voting for him to step down, though he will remain Twitter’s owner. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job,” Musk said at the time. “After that, I will just run the software and servers teams.”
Meanwhile, Musk has said he does expect to install a new Twitter chief executive before the end 2023.
“I’m guessing probably towards the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company, because I think it should be in a stable position around, you know, at the end of this year,” Musk said via video link at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out.”
The dogecoin price more than doubled after Musk’s Twitter takeover last year as traders bet the Tesla billionaire could add dogecoin support and drive adoption.
Musk has repeatedly named dogecoin as his preferred cryptocurrency over the last few years, calling for it to lower fees and speed up transaction times so it can become “the currency of Earth.”
The dogecoin price was trading for a mere fraction of a cent in late 2020 before high-profile investors and influences led by Musk and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban helped dogecoin ride a bitcoin and crypto price boom to a market capitalization of almost $100 billion in May 2021.
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The dogecoin price jumped following Elon Musk’s tongue-in-cheek that named his dog Floki as … [+] Twitter’s new chief executive.
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Musk said he planned to put a “literal” dogecoin on the moon via his rocket company SpaceX—plans which have yet to materialize—and revealed he personally holds dogecoin, as well as bitcoin and ethereum.
Dogecoin
DOGE
has since crashed back to a mere $11 billion but remains a top ten cryptocurrency alongside bitcoin, ethereum and Ripple’s XRP
XRP
.
Musk’s plan to take Twitter private and turn it into a WeChat-like super app, potentially facilitating bitcoin, crypto and dogecoin payments, revived interest in the doge-based cryptocurrency, which was initially created as a “joke.”
