Dogecoin Surges as Elon Musk Teases Tesla Merchandise Plan

Dogecoin surged as much as 33% after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric-car maker would accept dogecoin as payment for its merchandise.

• “Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes,” Musk tweeted.
• Dogecoin rose to as high as $0.20 following Musk’s tweet, before falling back to about $0.18.

• Musk, who was yesterday named Time magazine’s person of the year, has previously lent support to dogecoin development and adoption even as the memecoin’s creators abandoned the project back in 2015.
• Earlier this year, Tesla started accepting bitcoin as payment for its electric cars. The pilot proved short-lived amid rising concerns about Bitcoin’s energy usage and was soon dropped.
• Musk has tweeted regularly about dogecoin. In February he posted a picture of a rocket next to the moon. He followed that post with a one-word tweet stating “Doge” – a play on the saying of “going to the moon,” a term for an asset-price surge. The same month he posted an edited picture from “The Lion King,” with himself as Rafiki and a Shiba Inu as Simba. Dogecoin prices jumped again.
• A May tweet saw Musk state he was working with dogecoin developers to improve system efficiency. It sent dogecoin prices flying by 22%. Then in June, he tweeted it was “important to support” a proposal that sought to reduce dogecoin fees – one that would make dogecoin more competitive compared to other cryptocurrencies.
• Still, Musk does not see the crypto sector succeeding as many crypto fanatics otherwise do. In a recent interview after being named Time’s Person of The Year for 2021, Musk said he “doubts that crypto will replace fiat currency.”

UPDATE (Dec. 13, 11:00 UTC): Adds tweet.

UPDATE (Dec. 13, 11:48 UTC): Replaces tweet with dogecoin price graph, adds history on previous tweets.