Dogecoin is still in the dog house after Elon Musk’s ‘SNL’ appearance
Dogecoin prices rebounded Tuesday morning after Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked his nearly 54 million Twitter followers if they want his car company to “accept Doge.” Nearly 77% of the poll’s respondents said yes.
But even after a nearly 10% price spike Tuesday — from about 46 cents to around 50 cents per coin— dogecoin is still trading well below the levels it hit just before Musk’s “Saturday Night Live” appearance a few days ago.
Dogecoin prices were north of 70 cents early Saturday and had pulled back a bit to around 65 cents just before the show aired.
But instead of hyping dogecoin, as many backers had hoped, Musk poked fun at it in a bit with his mom in the opening monologue — and again in a “Weekend Update” segment in which he played a fictitious financial expert named Lloyd Ostertag who called dogecoin a “hustle.”
The cryptocurrency promptly fell about 20% to 51 cents just after the show and kept sliding to about 44 cents Sunday morning before recovering a bit.
The post-“SNL” slide shows how fraught dogecoin’s rise has been. The show is a comedy series, not an infomercial, and anyone expecting Musk would be allowed to heap breathless praise on the cryptocurrency and not joke about it clearly miscalculated.
Damage control
Even so, Musk now appears to be doing some damage control, reminding investors that he is open to taking payments in dogecoin as well as in crypto leader bitcoin, which Tesla already accepts as payment for its vehicles and holds on its balance sheet.
In addition to polling followers Tuesday about the possibility of letting customers buy a Model S, 3, X or Y vehicle with doge, Musk’s other well-known company, SpaceX, just revealed it will allow a customer launching a payload on an upcoming lunar mission to pay in dogecoin.
That news helped the cryptocurrency bounce off the low it hit Sunday. But it begs the question whether the pre-“SNL” price for dogecoin, which now has a total worth of $65 billion and is the world’s fourth most valuable cryptocurrency, will turn out to be its peak.
Of course, anyone holding dogecoin for the past few months has little to complain about. The price has surged more than 10,000% so far in 2021.
But in the rapidly changing world of cryptocurrencies, investors always have some other shiny new coin to explore.
There’s even an alternative canine-themed coin, the Shiba Inu, which has soared nearly 2,000% in just the past week and now has a market value of about $13 billion. Shiba Inu is the Japanese breed of dog that has become the face of many dogecoin memes.
And a brand new crypto that launched this week, Internet Computer (ICP), has stormed out of the gate and is already worth nearly $50 billion. That makes ICP, a token similar to ethereum, the world’s eighth-largest cryptocurrency.
