While Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin investors sold. When SNL first went live, the cryptocurrency was hovering around 69 cents (fine). But as the show progressed, the price dropped. At the time of this writing, it is worth 56 cents, a drop of 12%.
Dogecoin traded as low as $ 0.47 on crypto exchange Binance, down 28% from levels around $ 0.65 before the show.
Cryptocurrency enthusiasts had been itching for days to see what he would say, after his tweets this year turned the once dark digital currency into a speculator’s dream.
When asked ‘what is dogecoin’, Musk replied: “It is the future of the currency. It is an unstoppable financial vehicle that is going to take over the world.”
When a cast member of the show, Michael Che, responded, “So it’s a hustle?” Musk replied, “Yes, it’s a hustle.” And laughed.
Musk is the rare business mogul who was asked to host the venerable television comedy show. The timing is bringing Musk back into the limelight just as Tesla shares are losing steam after last year’s monstrous rally.
The unconventional CEO has posted numerous comments about cryptocurrencies on Twitter and criticized old cash for having negative real interest rates.
“Only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere,” he said in February.
His cryptic “Doge” and “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” tweets this month kicked off a dogecoin rally – Created as a parody on the more traditional bitcoin and ethereum. Read more
Musk tweeted Thursday: “Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution!” with an attached video clip in which he said: “It should be considered speculation at this point. And so, you know, don’t go too deep into crypto speculation …”
But he also said in the video that the cryptocurrency has a “good chance” of becoming what he called “the future currency of the Earth”.
On crypto data tracker CoinGecko.com, dogecoin has jumped over 800% over the past month,. And is now the fourth largest digital currency, with a market cap of $ 73 billion. It hit a record high above $ 0.73 on Thursday.
It has overtaken the most widely used cryptocurrencies such as litecoin and tether.
