Billionaire Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, often tweets about different cryptocurrencies, and in doing so, has seemingly impacted their prices.
A few times throughout 2021, the price of an altcoin called shiba inu appeared to jump after Musk repeatedly posted images of his shiba inu puppy on Twitter.
But on Sunday, Musk clarified that he doesn’t own any shiba inu coins and that he only owns bitcoin, ether and dogecoin. “That’s it,” he said.
“As I’ve said before, don’t bet the farm on crypto!” Musk tweeted. “True value is building products & providing services to your fellow human beings, not money in any form.”
Musk also confirmed that he owns bitcoin, ether and dogecoin in July during “The B-Word” conference.
On Sunday, he explained why he supports dogecoin, a meme-inspired cryptocurrency that began as a joke in 2013, in particular.
For Musk, it all started after hearing from his employees, he said.
“Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge,” Musk said. “They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge — it felt like the people’s crypto.”
His support for dogecoin isn’t new. In fact, Musk started to tweet about dogecoin back in 2019.
Though Musk said he hasn’t recently been in contact with dogecoin developers, he has repeatedly mentioned working with them throughout the year.
Musk has even joked about dogecoin potentially becoming the future reserve currency.
“The point is that dogecoin was invented as a joke, essentially to make fun of cryptocurrency,” he told TMZ in May. “Fate loves irony. What would be the most ironic outcome? The currency that started as a joke in fact becomes the real currency. To the moon!”
But remember, just because Musk or another influencer or executive tweets about a cryptocurrency does not mean it is valuable or a good investment. Feeding into social media hype will often result in money lost, experts warn.
That’s in part why investors should always do their own research before deciding where to put their money. As the SEC warned in 2017, “it is never a good idea to make an investment decision just because someone famous says a product or service is a good investment.”
Experts view cryptocurrency as a volatile, risky and speculative investment. They warn to only invest what you can afford to lose.
As of 11:33 a.m. EST, bitcoin is trading at around $63,319, ether at around $4,151 and dogecoin at around 27 cents, according to Coin Metrics.
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