‘New CEO’ – Elon Musk Teases Twitter Shake-Up, Sending Price of Bitcoin Rival Dogecoin Soaring
Twitter owner Elon Musk, whose fickle support for meme-based bitcoin rival dogecoin has waned recently, has once again sent the price sharply higher.
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Musk teased Twitter usage with photos of his dog Floki — the shiba inu bread used by dogecoin — as the social media company’s “new CEO,” raising hopes among long-suffering dogecoin holders that Musk could integrate the cryptocurrency into the platform.
The dogecoin price rallied after Musk’s tongue-in-cheek post, though it remains well below the Musk-hype-fueled levels it reached in May 2021 after crashing alongside the price of bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies.
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“The new CEO of Twitter is amazing,” Musk posted to Twitter alongside a photo of his dog Floki. “He’s perfect,” Musk replied to dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who joked, “I guess he was the only one crazy enough to take the job.”
Floki is “better than the other guy,” Musk said, apparently referring to former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, whom Musk fired after buying the company in late October.
Musk began the search for a new Twitter chief in December after a Twitter poll resulted in users voting for him to step down, although he will remain Twitter’s owner. “I will step down as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job,” Musk said at the time. “After that, I’ll just run the software and server teams.”
Meanwhile, Musk has said he expects to install a new Twitter chief before the end of 2023.
“I guess by the end of this year it’s probably going to be good timing to find somebody else to run the company because I think it should be in a stable position around, you know, the end of this year,” Musk said via video link at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially sound place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out.”
The dogecoin price more than doubled after Musk’s Twitter takeover last year as traders bet the Tesla billionaire could add dogecoin support and drive adoption.
Musk has repeatedly named dogecoin as his cryptocurrency of choice over the past few years, calling for it to lower fees and speed up transaction times so it can become “the currency of the earth.”
Dogecoin’s price traded for just a fraction of a cent in late 2020 before high-profile investors and influencers led by Musk and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban helped dogecoin with a bitcoin and crypto price boom to a market cap of nearly $100 billion by May 2021 .
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Musk said he planned to put a “literal” dogecoin on the moon via his rocket company SpaceX — plans that have yet to come to fruition — and revealed that he personally held dogecoin, as well as bitcoin and ethereum.
DogecoinDOGE has since crashed back to just $11 billion, but remains a top ten cryptocurrency alongside bitcoin, ethereum and Ripple’s XRPXRP.
Musk’s plan to take Twitter private and turn it into a WeChat-like super app, potentially enabling payments with bitcoin, crypto and dogecoin, has revived interest in the doge-based cryptocurrency, which was originally created as a “joke”.
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