Elon Musk replaces Twitter bird logo for dogecoin’s shiba inu
The price of the dogecoin cryptocurrency shot up more than 30 per cent after Elon Musk replaced Twitter’s bird symbol with one of the coin’s shiba inu dog.
The move by the billionaire came after his lawyers on Friday asked a federal judge to throw out a $258bn lawsuit accusing the entrepreneur of manipulating dogecoin’s price and driving it up by 36,000 per cent.
Following the change to the Twitter logo Mr Musk shared a meme about it on his own Twitter account, which has more than 133 million followers.In court filings for the lawsuit, which was filed against Mr Musk in 2022, his lawyers stated that his comments on dogecoin were “innocuous and often silly.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
Mr Musk has repeatedly tweeted about the cryptocurrency, which was first started as a joke coin in 2013, and most of his comments about it have moved its price. Dogecoin is the eighth most valuable cryptocurrency with a market cap of around $13bn according to CoinMarketCap.com.
The doge logo appeared on the site two days after Musk asked a judge to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the dogecoin, according to Reuters.
Lawyers for Musk and Tesla called the lawsuit by dogecoin investors a “fanciful work of fiction” over Musk’s “innocuous and often silly tweets.”
It wasn’t clear whether the logo change was permanent. Musk has been known to use Twitter to troll both his fans and his critics.
The price of dogecoin, which is typically volatile, was up more than 20% over the past 24 hours, to about 9 cents. It was trading just under 8 cents.
Dogecoin was created December 6, 2013, by a pair of software engineers — as a joke. The name is a nod to the “doge” meme that became popular a decade ago. Its Shiba Inu mascot mimicks that meme: a dog surrounded by a bunch of Comic Sans text in broken English.