Dogecoin Surges Over 90% Following Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover 

With Elon Musk finally taking the reins at Twitter last week, the value of Dogecoin rallied by more than 90% — jumping from US$0.05 to $0.14 briefly on October 30 before dropping to 11 cents at the time of writing.

Despite the latest surge, in defiance of the prevailing crypto winter, DOGE remains down 84% on its all-time-high of US$0.73 in May 2021 according to CoinMarketCap. Dogecoin now ranks eighth in the market, overtaking Cardano (ADA) with a market cap of US$15.6 million.

Musk has long been a supporter of the meme coin, and has been attributed as the cause of several major DOGE price pumps, including when he first announced his intent to buy Twitter. 

The Twitter acquisition process was fraught, with Musk seeking to renege his offer and then backflipping in early October —ostensibly to avoid legal action brought about by Twitter. At the time, Musk’s confirmation that he’d close the deal led to a small bump in Dogecoin’s value of around 9%. 

Officially becoming Twitter’s boss has come with some surprising learning opportunities for Musk:

Musk loves DOGE

CEO of electric car company Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX, Musk has touted his admiration for Dogecoin in various tweets and interview mentions since 2019. He also began accepting Dogecoin as a payment in exchange for merchandise of his companies. 

Musk had also hinted that he was considering making DOGE a payment option for Twitter users to authenticate their accounts. Since the acquisition was finalised, Cardano’s founder and CEO Charles Hoskinson went as far as predicting DOGE could be integrated with the social media platform:

Musk’s support for DOGE has not been without controversy. In June this year a US$258 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Musk and his companies, alleging Musk had been essentially running a Ponzi scheme — intentionally manipulating the price of the coin for profit.