Dogecoin Jumps 20% After Musk's Twitter Shout-Out; Bitcoin Joke Spurs Dialogue With Saylor

Why Elon Musk was tweeting about dogecoin early Sunday morning is anyone’s guess. But the small cryptocurrency spiked 20% following the SpaceX CEO’s weekend Twitter antics. It also started a dialogue with MicroStrategy CEO and noted bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor.

• At 9:30 UTC, Musk opened Twitter and wrote to his 40 million followers, "One word: Doge."
• DOGE immediately spiked to $0.0047, its highest mark since early July. At press time, some of the gains had been retraced with DOGE trading hands at $0.0045 on Binance.
• Musk also fired off a series of entertaining – and often racy – bitcoin tweets (here, here, here, here). In one he said, "Bitcoin is almost as BS as fiat money," which could be construed as a backhanded compliment if one tries hard enough.
• One of those R-rated bitcoin tweets prompted a response from MicroStrategy's Saylor, who has famously loaded up his company's treasury with bitcoin.
• "If you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor, convert the $TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC. Other firms on the S&P 500 would follow your lead & in time it would grow to become a $1 trillion favor," Saylor wrote.
• Musk soon replied: "Are large transactions even possible?" To which Saylor responded: "Yes I have purchased over $1.3 billion in #BTC in past months & would be happy to share my playbook with you offline - one rocket scientist to another."
• While that back-and-forth between billionaires prompted comments from others, including one from Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of crypto exchange Binance best known as "CZ", neither Musk nor Saylor has responded since.
• Dogecoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency, made headlines in July after TikTok users started a campaign dedicated to pushing the price of 1 DOGE above $1, per CoinDesk's prior reporting.
• Tweeting about dogecoin is nothing new for Musk. The billionaire inventor has called dogecoin his "fav cryptocurrency" in the past (abbreviation for "favorite") in addition to temporarily including the label "CEO of Dogecoin" in his Twitter account biography. Sunday morning, Musk's account describes him as "Former CEO of Dogecoin."
• At last check, dogecoin reached a total market capitalization of $588 million, per OnChainFX.

Update (Dec. 20, 16:52 UTC): Adds MicroStrategy CEO's response to a Musk bitcoin tweet.
Update (Dec. 20, 23:52 UTC): Adds Musk's response to MicroStrategy CEO'.