Nikolas Sargeant
Elon Musk is a busy man, running Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, X and various others. He also has seven kids. But despite all this, he has found plenty of time to become a master manipulator of the crypto world.
Musk’s tool of choice is X, formerly Twitter, and he first began wielding it in an expert fashion back in 2021, when he suddenly decided to weigh into the crypto markets, tweeting his opinions about the likes of Bitcoin and Dogecoin to his millions-strong follower base.
Musk quickly became known as one of the industry’s archetype crypto pumpers, with a single tweet sending the price of his favorite meme coin, Dogecoin, up by as much as 50%. For a long time in 2021, the crypto market seemed almost beholden to the musings of the world’s richest entrepreneur.
Unrivaled Pumping Power
It’s not easy to measure the impact of a single tweet on the prices of crypto assets, but it’s undeniable that there is a direct correlation between Musk’s praises and the subsequent rise of whatever token he happened to be tweeting about.
Musk took a particular liking to Dogecoin, with a series of tweets back in 2021 sending the canine cryptocurrency close to the moon. Notably on Feb. 4, a flurry of tweets talking about DOGE sent the value of that token up more than 50% in less than 24 hours, and he followed in December that year with another 43% pump when announcing that his company, Tesla, would begin accepting DOGE payments.
Earlier, he had a similar impact on the world’s most popular cryptocurrency when he announced that you can “now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin”. The fact that one of the world’s biggest and best known companies was accepting BTC payments helped push it to a new all-time high of almost $65,000 back in March 2023.
Clearly enjoying his status as one of the most influential voices in crypto, Musk apparently decided the following year to see if his tweets might have the opposite impact. In July 2022, he revealed on Twitter that Tesla had sold off most of its BTC holdings, helping to accelerate a decline in Bitcoin’s price that had already seen it fall from over $70,000 to less than $25,000.
Musk’s Most Legendary Meme Coin Pumps
Musk is clearly a big fan of Bitcoin, but he appears to be even more taken by meme coins, which are a type of cryptocurrency based on internet memes or sensations. Dogecoin itself is probably the best-known meme coin, but there are plenty of others that have gotten the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s attention.
In fact, Musk’s propensity for pumping meme coins has become so legendary that the crypto world responded by creating an entirely new set of coins just to celebrate that fact. Some of the best known “Elon” coins include Dogelon Mars, ElonDoge.io, Baby Grok, Dogs of Elon and the rather aptly named “Elon”. Musk’s ability to pump meme coins is unrivaled in the crypto world. A case in point is LADYS, a meme coin done in conjunction alongside a popular NFT collection, which surged by an incredible 7300% in just 24 hours after Musk referred to it in one of his tweets.
What’s really fascinating is that Musk didn’t even mention the word “LADYS”, but simply tweeted a meme that used imagery from an NFT. That alone was enough to send the price of LADYS flying into orbit. Musk’s tweet ultimately garnered over 178,000 likes and more than 17,000 retweets
More recent tweets on the newly rebranded X platform have helped boost other meme coins that were, until mentioned by Musk, almost completely unknown. For instance, the Marvin Inu coin jumped by more than 400% after Musk posted a picture of his cherubic pet dog named Marvin on the social media platform. Meanwhile, Grok, a meme coin that’s based on xAI’s Grok large language model, also made speculator gains earlier this year following another Musk tweet.
All the while, Musk hasn’t forgotten his infatuation with Dogecoin. Shortly after meeting with U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, he posted on X that he’s willing to serve in government as head of a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, acronym DOGE, sparking another short-lived pump.
The Real Impact Of Musk
Although Musk has often been accused of pumping crypto tokens for personal gain, in many cases his tweets have proven to be an enabler that have transformed whimsical memes into something much more substantial. In the case of Dogecoin, Musk’s repeated X posts have helped to unite what was once seen as one of the most toxic crypto communities into one of the industry’s most vibrant and committed.
Musk’s promotion of Dogecoin has directly contributed to its rising popularity and its undeniable cultural significance, with the token now even more recognizable than the original “doge” meme it was based on. Dogecoin’s cultural relevance has enabled it to enter the mainstream and it’s widely considered to be one of the top crypto assets around, sometimes even touted as a possible rival to Bitcoin itself as cryptocurrency strives to replace traditional fiat.
The Musk effect has gone well beyond merely pumping Dogecoin’s value, helping to shape its community and solidify its unique standing in the crypto world. If it wasn’t for Musk, it’s highly unlikely that Dogecoin would be accepted by more than 50 globally recognized brands today.
Similarly, Musk’s tweet appears to have sparked a fury around the LADYS meme coin, propelling it from relative obscurity to one of the most widely recognized symbols of the growing meme coin movement. Having previously only been available to buy on Uniswap, it was quickly added to multiple top-tier cryptocurrency exchanges, with Bybit even creating a LADYS prize pool to incentivize deposits of the token.
LADYS’ own community clearly believes it encompasses much more than just meme value. They have set about transforming LADYS to cement its status as one of the top memecoins in the crypto world, pitching it as a tokenisation model that’s designed to “facilitate the accumulation of meme capital in the era of unstoppable meme coins.”
LADYS appears to be well on the way to succeeding in that mission, as it recently announced it had secured a $5 million investment from the well known crypto venture firm DWF Labs. Those funds are intended to help LADYS build a “movement where all are welcome to consume the fully tokenised memetically optimized whitepill, revolutionising love, karma and memes”.
A Force For Good
The major impact of the “Musk effect” on Dogecoin and LADYS demonstrates that the Tesla boss has an almost unparalleled ability to significantly shape not only the direction of the crypto markets, but also to breathe life into individual projects alone, whether he’s invested in them or not.
Musk has almost single-handedly transformed the perception of Dogecoin from being little more than a joke, into one of the most recognizable and widely-accepted cryptocurrencies of all. At the same time, he has helped to kick-start yet another meme movement that’s focused on spreading the message of love and unity with his endorsement of LADYS.
Although Musk has often been accused of simply manipulating the crypto markets for personal gain, it’s hard to deny that his unique influence on the industry is, more often than not, a force for good, having an extremely positive impact on the crypto movement as a whole.
