On Monday, dogecoin’s price spiked more than 30% after Twitter CEO Elon Musk replaced the blue bird on Twitter’s website with an image of a Shiba Inu, the digital coin’s logo. Lawyers for Twitter and Musk asked a federal judge on Friday to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit from 2022 accusing Musk of manipulating dogecoin’s price by over 36,000%. In response to Twitter changing its logo to a Shiba Inu image, Musk shared a meme with his 133.5 million followers. The dog appeared only for some Twitter users, including those on its website.
Years ago, Musk began promoting dogecoin. His tweets about the token, created as a joke in 2013, predictably cause volatility. CoinMarketCap.com reports that dogecoin has a market cap of over $13 billion, making it the eighth most valuable cryptocurrency. Musk’s lawyers described his public statements about the coin as “innocuous and often silly tweets” in a court filing Friday. But Musk’s public endorsement of the coin runs beyond social media messages. Two of Musk’s other companies, Tesla and the Boring Company, are named in the lawsuit. Tesla announced it would accept dogecoin in December 2021. At the time, Musk tweeted that Tesla would “see how it goes.” Dogecoin rose more than 20% following that tweet. In January 2022, when Musk announced on Twitter that dogecoin payments were live, the cryptocurrency jumped as much as 15%. Tesla does have digital assets on its books, including bitcoin, and still accepts dogecoin as payment for some merchandise. “We have not sold any of our dogecoins,” Musk said on an earnings call last year. “We still have it.” Musk has indicated that he holds dogecoin as well. In a recent tweet, responding to a photograph of himself next to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Musk wrote: “Dogecoin.”