Is Musk finally losing his grip on manipulating the crypto market?
It’s no longer a secret that Musk is a king when it comes to manipulating the crypto market. Tweets from the Tesla boss have sent the prices of cryptos surging on multiple occasions. For instance, the price of Bitcoin crashed in mid-May when he announced that his electric vehicle manufacturing company Tesla was no longer going to accept BTC payments, citing environmental concerns.
Musk’s latest attempt to pump Dogecoin didn’t go as planned. Although the price of the meme coin surged briefly following a Twitter endorsement from the billionaire on Thursday morning, it didn’t perform as expected. As of press time, Dogecoin was trading at $0.24, with a 24-hour gain of 1.07% and a weekly loss of 6.87%.
At around 8: 43 am on Thursday, Musk tweeted a Godfather meme showing Marlon Brando's iconic character, Don Vito Corleone, with a text that read, "YOU COME TO ME AT RUNTIME TO TELL ME THE CODE YOU ARE RUNNING DOES NOT COMPILE." He captioned the tweet “Release the Doge.”
Moments after his tweet, the price of Dogecoin rose by over 8%, from $0.24 to $0.261. However, the funfair was quickly shot down by a sell-off which took the pair back to the $0.24 region.
Not satisfied with the results, Tesla followed his earlier tweet with a supporting but babbling tweet that read “Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, Baby Doge.”
The DOGE/USD trading pair rose by 5.22% to $0.26, on the second tweet. In the hours that followed, the trading pair struggled to reclaim its intraday high of $0.261, but this was short-lived as traders continued to take profit.
As earlier mentioned, the price of Dogecoin is back to where it was before Musk began hyping it.
Earlier this year, Musk sent the crypto market into a buying frenzy following a series of tweets about Dogecoin. He fueled massive retail-led price spikes, which saw the market cap of DOGE peak at almost $100 billion in early May. At that time, the DOGE/USD trading pair hit a new all-time high of $0.76. The pair is now worth less than half of its value two months ago, primarily due to China’s clampdown on crypto mining activities. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several major digital assets have all crashed by more than 50% since mid-May.