Price of dogecoin rises by 50% following Elon Musk tweet

‘Dogecoin is the people’s crypto’, tweeted Musk on 4 February. Photograph: Joe Skipper/Reuters

Thanks to boosts from the world’s richest man, the cryptocurrency has skyrocketed in value, along with bitcoin

The price of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency, has soared after Elon Musk underlined his power as a market tipster by tweeting about it.

Dogecoin’s price rose by 50% on 4 February shortly after Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and the world’s richest person, tweeted that “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”.

“No highs, no lows, only Doge”, he added. He also tweeted a meme featuring himself and dogecoin in Disney’s The Lion King.

Dogecoin, which uses a shiba inu dog meme as its logo, was started in 2013 as a joke, after the invention of bitcoin prompted a wave of imitator cryptocurrencies. However, the joke caught on, and the coins had a market value of $6.3bn (£4.6bn) on Thursday morning, according to Coinmarketcap.com, a cryptocurrency data provider.

The value of a single coin rose to $0.05204 that Thursday morning, up by almost three cents in 24 hours. The volume of trading more than tripled over the course of the day.

Last month, Musk became the world’s richest person, above Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as the value of his shareholding in Tesla soared, in part because of huge interest in the electric car pioneer from amateur and retail investors as well as from large institutions.

Musk has long been a prolific user of social media, with a familiarity with online culture that is unusual among prominent chief executives. He had vowed on Tuesday to take a break from Twitter, before returning with comments that pumped up the value of dogecoin.

In recent weeks Musk’s tweets and comments have moved financial markets. At the height of the retail share trading mania surrounding GameStop, a US videogame retailer, he tweeted “Gamestonk”, a reference to stock market memes.

Read more: www.theguardian.com