The price of the niche cryptocurrency Dogecoin surged more than 30% after Twitter CEO Elon Musk replaced the blue bird on his company’s website with an image of the digital coin’s logo, a Shiba Inu.
Last Friday, attorneys representing Twitter and Musk requested a federal judge to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit filed in 2022 that accused Musk of manipulating Dogecoin’s price and driving it up over 36,000%.
After the Shiba Inu image replaced the Twitter logo, Musk shared a meme regarding the change with his 133.5 million Twitter followers. Some users of Twitter, including those on its website, saw the dog, but Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk started touting dogecoin years ago. He periodically tweets about the token, which was created as a joke in 2013, predictably causing volatility each time. As per , CoinMarketCap dogecoin is the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market cap of over $13 billion.
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 goes further than social media messages. Two of Musk’s other companies, Tesla
and the Boring Company, are named in the lawsuit.
In December 2021, Tesla announced it would accept the coin for some merchandise. At the time, Musk said on Twitter 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 dogecoin,” Musk said on an earnings call last year. “We still have it.”
Musk has indicated that he personally holds dogecoin as well.
In a recent tweet, responding to a photograph of himself next to News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, Musk simply wrote: “Dogecoin.”