Elon Musk’s Twitter Changes Logo to Doge, Pushing Memecoin Up 20%
Elon Musk appears with Dogecoin at a Bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong. Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On Monday, Twitter changed its web and mobile browser logo to the popular Doge meme, the icon used by the infamous Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency known as a “memecoin.” Dogecoin surged 20% in just 30 minutes as the internet took notice.
Elon Musk has long been a Dogecoin booster, and his tweets and appearances on TV shows, among others Saturday Night Livehas often affected the value of the cryptocurrency.
He has been happily moving the memecoin market since taking over as CEO of the social media platform in October. In February, after tweeting a photo of his own pet doge, the token’s market cap increased by $500 million.
Dogecoin was the first memecoin, or a cryptocurrency that lacks any underlying value aside from its status as a joke. Its lightness has not prevented the token from amassing a massive following, with a market cap of over $13 billion. (Each coin is still worth less than 10 cents.)
Musk, a notorious promoter of memes, has often latched onto Dogecoin’s internet popularity, even before he bought Twitter. In December 2021, he boasted that Tesla would start accepting Dogecoin for some of its items.
The new CEO of Twitter is amazing pic.twitter.com/yBqWFUDIQH
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 15 February 2023
With Musk’s Twitter experiment proving a financial challenge, experts have speculated about his long-term plan for the platform. A possible way forward is to transform it into a payment service, where users will be able to transfer both fiat and cryptocurrency to creators and other users.
He first sent payments for Twitter in a pitch deck to investors in May — the platform currently has a tipping feature, though it only generates about $15 million annually. In January was Financial Times reported that the company was applying for regulatory licenses to operate across the United States as a payment processor.
Dogecoin hasn’t been Musk’s only foray into crypto. Tesla bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in February 2021, even as the company unloaded 75% of its holdings amid a market downturn in mid-2022.
When Fortune reached out to Twitter’s press account to ask about the latest Doge-themed stunt, it automatically responded with another meme championed by the Mercurial founder: The poop emoji.
