Elon Musk Buys Twitter (Finally). Here’s Why That’s Bullish for Crypto

A History of Elon Musk’s Love Affair with Crypto, What It Means for Twitter

If there’s one person responsible for the biggest upsurge in cryptocurrency prices and investment in recent years, it’s Elon Musk. Sure, he remains a divisive figure, with some commentators arguing that he’s a modern-day emperor with no clothes. Yet his tweets about cryptocurrency — as well as his publicized investments in crypto — were a big factor in the bull market of 2020-21, and they continue to be a driving force behind cryptocurrency trading even today.

Musk (in)famously tweeted “Bitcoin is my safe word” on December 20, 2020, when BTC was worth around $23,863. It then proceeded to surge to over $40,000 by January 10.

The market intensified even further when Musk changed his Twitter bio to read “Bitcoin,” a move which resulted in an immediate 15% rise in the cryptocurrency’s price. This was likely around the very time Tesla made its purchase of around $1.5 billion in BTC, an investment that was disclosed on February 8.

Source: Twitter

Needless to say, BTC rose to new all-time highs in the wake of this revelation, yet Musk has also had a very big hand in promoting Dogecoin. He posted a variety of tweets in the first half of 2021 that saw DOGE rise to a record high of $0.731578 on May 8, the date he famously appeared on Saturday Night Live.

Fast forward to April of this year, and Musk offers to buy Twitter for $44 billion and take it private. Importantly, it’s around this time that Musk also floated the possibility of introducing a monthly subscription service for Twitter Blue, accompanied by an option to pay it in dogecoin.

It was around this time that the DOGE price had increased by around 25%, after revelations that Musk was a major shareholder in Twitter. And funnily, the price of DOGE has also rallied in the past few days, following the completion of the $44 billion deal.

The DOGE price over the past month. Source: CoinGecko

In fact, DOGE has risen by 104% in the past 14 days, as of writing. At its highest, it rose by 137%, peaking at $0.140356 on Sunday October 30.

This easily makes it the highest performing coin among the top 100 cryptocurrencies (by market cap), with bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH) up by 6% and 18%, respectively, in the past fortnight. However, since the deal was confirmed on October 28, the whole market is up by 4.5%, something which likely isn’t a coincidence.

Cryptocurrency Booster

Indeed, if Musk’s past history with crypto is a reliable guide, the market has further rises in store. Tesla still owns around 10,500 BTC (worth approx. $211.9 million), so Twitter’s new owner has an incentive in seeing the price of bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies in general — rise. In other words, there’s every chance that he will use the social network to promote crypto in one way or another.

This could be via the introduction of cryptocurrency payments, which aside from the aforementioned dogecoin tweet, is a possibility Elon Musk mentioned in a virtual all-hands meeting held between him and Twitter employees in June. Speaking at this meeting, he said that money is “fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while” and that it “would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so it’s easy to send money back and forth.”

In May, Musk also mentioned during a podcast that he would like to transform Twitter into a kind of all-in-one super app, much like China’s WeChat. Speaking of WeChat in the context of his plans for Twitter, he said, “It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface.” He also added that payments would be a big part of such an app, explaining that when you “have a high trust situation, then payments, whether it’s crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.”

It’s also interesting to note that, during this same podcast, Musk would make his super app “a spam-free thing” where bots were a thing of the past. This is important for crypto insofar as Twitter-based scams are something that has sullied the sector’s reputation for some time now, with virtually every post by a high-profile industry figure being met by fake accounts and scammers trying to defraud genuine Twitter users. If Musk were able to follow through on his promises and actually rid Twitter of its spam and bot problem, this would be something that would reflect positively on crypto.

Of course, Musk is notorious for promising lots and lots of things, so ‘plans’ may not necessarily turn into reality. Even so, he has spent a very large fortune in order to acquire Twitter, so it’s more than plausible to suggest that he has an interest in making his ownership of the social network a success. And given just how synonymous Musk now is with Dogecoin and other tokens, his success will be crypto’s success.