At the top of the Twitter website, the little blue bird gave way to a new logo on Tuesday April 4: a yellow dog with a disturbing look. This icon is that of dogecoin, one of the ten cryptocurrencies with the highest capitalization, according to the American economic media Forbes.
This change, like a schoolboy joke forty-eight hours after the 1er April and which is most certainly the work of the new boss of the social network, Elon Musk – according to an image posted on Twitter by the person concerned –, caused dogecoin prices to soar by 30%.
But above all, he intervened when Mr. Musk has been prosecuted since June 2022 for having, according to his accusers, contributed to artificially inflating the price of this same cryptocurrency for two years. The plaintiffs, investors who lost money buying and reselling dogecoins since 2019, are now seeking $258 billion in compensation (about €237 billion). Elon Musk’s lawyers on Friday called for the charges to be dropped, saying ” there is nothing illegal about tweeting a message of support for a perfectly legitimate virtual currency, whose valuation remains around 10 billion dollars [un peu plus de 9 milliards d’euros] “.
“People’s Crypto”
When it was created in 2013, dogecoin was presented as a parody of more or less robust cryptocurrencies launched in the hope of replicating the success of bitcoin. The currency, symbolized by a Japanese dog of the shiba inu breed, quickly benefited from the ironic aura of a meme, and took advantage of an image of sympathy due to its modest quotation.
But dogecoin saw its price explode in 2021, thanks in part to Elon Musk, who introduced it earlier that year as the « crypto[monnaie] People “, evoking the plan to send the motto to the Moon. The American billionaire, however, also caused the price of cryptocurrency to drop massively a few months later, in May 2021, by presenting it as a scam during the very popular American television program “Saturday Night Live”.
This did not prevent him thereafter from continuing to make references to dogecoin, thus influencing its course. In January 2022, the CEO of Tesla announced that the automaker was accepting dogecoin payments for certain derivative products. And since his takeover of Twitter at the end of October, Elon Musk has toyed on several occasions with the idea of also allowing payments in dogecoins on the social network. If the businessman has repeatedly stated that he holds dogecoins and that Tesla also holds some, it is not known if this is still the case.
