With the price of Dogecoin surging, investors are looking ahead to Elon Musk's guest-host spot on this weekend's Saturday Night Live comedy sketch TV show after the billionaire's tweets this year turned the once-obscure digital currency into a speculator's dream.
The Tesla Chief
Executive will host the show at 11:30pm EDT (9am IST, Sunday) on Saturday (0330
GMT on Sunday). The timing puts Musk, who is also known as an enthusiast of
cryptocurrencies, back in the spotlight just as Tesla's stock is losing steam
following last year's monster rally.
Guest starring … pic.twitter.com/buM3bTOWbX
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2021
Musk is the rare
business mogul to be asked to host the venerable comedy TV show.
The unconventional
CEO has posted numerous comments about cryptocurrencies on Twitter and
criticised regular old cash for having negative real interest rates. "Only
a fool wouldn't look elsewhere," he said in February.
His cryptic tweets
"Doge" and "Dogecoin is the people's crypto" that month
kicked off a rally in Dogecoin - created as a joke on the more mainstream
bitcoin and Ethereum - that has yet to stop.
"I'm a wild
card, no telling what I might do," Musk, wearing a black bandana, joked
this week in a promotional video for the show alongside musical guest Miley
Cyrus. "Same here," Cyrus said. "Rules? No thanks."
On Thursday, Musk
tweeted: "Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with
caution!" with a video clip attached in which he said, "it should be
considered speculation at this point. And so, you know, don't don't go too far
in the crypto speculation ..."
But he also said,
in the video, that cryptocurrency has a "good chance" of becoming
what he called "the future currency of the earth."
"My Dogecoin
went up after you tweeted," one person shouted at Musk in the video.
"You're amazing. How did you do it?”
On crypto data tracker CoinGecko.com, Dogecoin has jumped more than 800 percent over the last month and is now the fourth-largest digital currency, with a market capitalisation of $81 billion. It was last up nearly 14 percent on the day at $0.62.
It has overtaken
more widely used cryptocurrencies like Litecoin and Tether.
"The latest
surge in Dogecoin is a continuation of the greater fool theory trend we've seen
playing out over the past couple of months," said David Kimberley, analyst
at investing app Freetrade.
"More people
are aware of what's going on and are looking to jump on the gravy train to make
a quick buck. It's very likely that Elon Musk pumping the coin tomorrow on
prime-time US TV will only serve to compound things and push the price
up."
Tesla said in
February it bought $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and would soon accept it as a
form of payment for its electric cars, a large stride toward mainstream
acceptance that sent Bitcoin soaring to a record high of nearly $62,000
Tesla shares
closed 1.3 percent higher at $672.37 on Friday.
© Reuters
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