Elon Musk and his obsession with cryptocurrency!
Elon Musk is the best thing that could have happened to cryptocurrencies. His series of bizarre tweets and amazing investments have changed the fortunes of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. These “coins” — really little more than lines of code — still have few real-life use cases.
They are pretty useful for buying drugs and laundering money but are also a favorite of libertarian paranoids. They are slowly making their way into everyday transactions. They pay no dividends and give no shareholder rights. They are very scandalous due to their history of dirty laundering and are criticized by environmentalists because they take up a huge amount of power to create. Their volatile value is only as much as the next person is prepared to pay for them. This changes when the next person Tesla founder Musk, a billionaire idolized by countless amateur traders, the amount can turn out to be quite high. In recent weeks, Musk has appeared to focus his attention on Dogecoin — a cryptocurrency branded with jaunty images of a Shiba Inu dog and established in 2013, very deliberately, as a joke.
I had literally established this coin as a joke in my mind because it is based on a meme. The creators thought nothing of it but as a practical joke. Musk tweeted on February 4, saying it was the “people’s crypto” and on Feb 6, made a poll asking if Dogecoin is the “future currency of the Earth”. Such tweets are obviously bound to raise the interest of the Twitterati who are looking for a figure to follow and who better than the founder of Tesla. To be honest, my interest was also piqued. I have never been into cryptocurrencies but now, I am thinking of investing in them. He managed to increase the market of Dogecoin as it is up 900 percent since late January. Now, it turns out that while Musk was drawing a crowd with his bizarre comments and images boosting a “currency” that, to reiterate, is a joke, it would have been worth paying more attention to another of his tweets. On December 20, Musk broadcasted a cartoon image of a monk, hands clasped in prayer, tagged as “me trying to live a more normal productive life”. To his side was the suggestive image of a beautiful young woman, skirts hitched to her waist and the word bitcoin was plastered over her nether regions. He is truly an eccentric billionaire.
After Musk simply wrote ‘#bitcoin’ in his Twitter biography, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency jumped as much as 20 percent on January 29. For people and youngsters who knew nothing about this currency before Musk started advertising it in full swing, I don’t know whether it’s a good influence or a bad. According to CNBC, Bitcoin climbed suddenly at around 3:30 am ET, adding $5,000 in the space of an hour to trade at $37,299. Within two hours, the cryptocurrency was trading 17 percent higher in the last 24 hours at around $36.000. This can only be due to Musk’s gimmicks regarding cryptocurrency and that man can create a rip
Musk now has 43.7 million followers on Twitter, including me and I think he is a real influencer. Netizens flooded Twitter and thanked Musk for his support to the “bitcoin movement”. One user even called it the “Elon Musk effect” while sharing the picture of the trading chart. Another user wrote, “It’s been Elon time we’ve been waiting for this”. I think he has taken the market by a storm.
Meanwhile, Musk’s addition of bitcoin to his social media profile comes after much speculation about whether the Tesla CEO will buy bitcoin or add the cryptocurrency to his electric car firm’s balance sheet. Musk even made headlines after a Twitter exchange with Michael Saylor, the CEO of software company MicroStrategy last month, which came after a tweet suggesting that he was tempted to buy bitcoin. “If you want to do your shareholders a $100 billion favor, convert the $TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC,” Saylor said at the time. In response, Musk said: “Are such large transactions even possible?” Everyone is waiting to see whether Musk will do it or not. When he does though, it will be a relief to a lot of us, if bitcoin is still legal in India.
Musk has a record of making market-moving comments on the site. Earlier, GameStop Corp, which has been at the center of the retail trading frenzy, surged 50 percent after Musk tweeted “Gamestonk”, along with a link to the Reddit Wallstreetbets stock trading discussion group.
Bitcoin jumped over 300 percent last year, as bigger US investors and corporations wanted to get exposure to the cryptocurrency. The digital coin is still about 13 percent off its all-time high but up around 25 percent since the start of the year. Bitcoin more than quadrupled over the course of 2020.
Musk is very comfortable with online culture, and the chief executive regularly posts memes, including related to financial topics. However, it has also caused problems for him and his company. In 2019 Musk reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share. I hope he doesn’t get into trouble with the authorities over his social media stunts.
