Who Is Elon Musk?
That can’t be true you don’t know who’s Elon Musk, but let’s pretend you don't and quickly remember who stands behind such a buzzing name.
Elon Musk was born on the 28th of June in 1971 and grew up in South Africa. He immigrated to Canada when he was 17 because he didn’t like the place at all, so he decided to quit. Later, he moved to the U.S. as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania. He always had a lust for start-ups, so in 1995 he founded Zip2, a company that provided maps and business directories to online newspapers. Then, he founded an online financial services company, X.com, which became PayPal, and specialized in transferring money online. The online auction eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
His space odyssey started in 2002 when he founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) to make more affordable rockets. Its first two rockets were the Falcon 1 first launched in 2006 and the larger Falcon 9 launched in 2010, which were designed to cost much less than competing rockets.
Elon Musk is revolutionizing transportation on Earth, through electric carmaker Tesla, and in space, with rocket producer SpaceX. SpaceX is valued at $125 billion after a funding round took place in May 2022.
He owns approximately 25% of Tesla between stock and options but has committed more than half his stock as collateral for loans.
Twitter's board decided to sell the company to Musk for $44 billion on April 25, 2022, after he gave away a 9.1% stake and a jeopardized hostile takeover.
Elon Musk Becomes a Dogefather
Out of a sudden, Elon Musk became a dogefather and a crypto influencer. He became one of the main Dogecoin ($DOGE) supporters and ambassadors. His tweets and interviews had an impact on its price and could easily shift them up and down, like a magic wand.
As Musk claimed, for him it all started after hearing about the currency from one of his employees.
“Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge,” Musk said. “They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge — it felt like the people’s crypto.”
Elon Musk first mentioned Dogecoin (DOGE) on April 2, 2019, tweeting “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.” That day the price of the coin swang from $0.002 on April 1 to $0.004 on April 4.
Musk’s tweeting about $DOGE resumed in December 2020 and continues up today, each post causing major swings in price. Just a single word “Doge,” tweeted on February 4, 2020, provoked a price increase of about 120% over four days.
Another post, criticizing Dogecoin’s extremely unequal wealth distribution (62% of DOGE supply is held by the 50 largest addresses, compared to Bitcoin’s 10.5%) ended up with a 20% price fall.
Elon Musk and His Crypto Diary
Musk’s involvement in the crypto universe started many moons ago. To track his awesome journey, let’s have a look at it year by year.
November 2017
For many involved ones, it started when a blog post shared on digital-currency sites wrote that Musk could be a mysterious Bitcoin founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. The billionaire turned the witty suggestion down and said he had forgotten where he had put his Bitcoin.
July 2020
Musk’s Twitter page is among accounts hacked to promote a crypto scam. Investors were given away at least $120,000 worth of Bitcoin that was faded away into other accounts by the hackers. U.S. authorities charged a 17-year-old Florida high school graduate and two others concerning the alleged hack.
Musk tweeted that month, “Excuse me, I only sell Doge!” That was definitely a reference to Dogecoin, a meme coin that started as a joke in 2013 with a Shiba Inu dog as a mascot.
December 2020
Musk requires converting “large transactions” of Tesla’s balance sheet into Bitcoin during a Twitter chit-chat with Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy Inc. “Are such large transactions even possible?” Musk tweeted.
January 2021
Dogecoin became a retail-trader fetish partly thanks to a Musk tweet featuring a “Dogue” magazine cover. There was no explanation of that move, but many users take that as another reference to Dogecoin.
January 2021
Again, no clear explanation from Musk, but he added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter profile page. Within minutes, Bitcoin skyrocketed as much as 15%, surging above $38,000, waking up speculations about him being a Bitcoin investor.
February 1, 2021
Speaking on the Clubhouse, Musk confirmed he’s a Bitcoin supporter. “Bitcoin is a good thing,” he said, adding that he was “late to the party” and should have bought some BTC eight years ago.
February 4, 2021
Musk posted several tweets about Dogecoin. “No highs, no lows, only Doge,” he tweeted. The dogecoin price increased almost 10% in an hour and over 50% in a day!
February 8, 2021
Dogecoin briefly gained a record after Musk as well as other celebrities Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons tweeted about it.
February 8, 2021
Tesla announces a $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin and a plan to accept digital currency as payment for electric cars. Bitcoin’s price gains more than 20% from its level before the announcement.
Dogecoin’s market value now sits at about $10 billion, making it the 10th biggest among cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap.
April 2021
Elon Musk called himself "dogefather" publicly for the first time.
June 2021
Musk tweeted that Tesla would begin accepting BTC once "there's confirmation of reasonable clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend." This tweet made Bitcoin's price up 8%-12%.
September 2021
Musk posted a picture of a new Shiba Inu puppy sleeping on the floor, explaining that 'Floki has arrived.' That motivated a frenzy in floki-themed currencies. The crypto Floki went up 250% after Musk's tweet, while Floki Inu flew 60% and Floki Shiba mounted 25%.
December 2021
Musk posted that Tesla would accept Dogecoin as payment for retail on a beta basis, sending the meme-based cryptocurrency up more than 20%. Dogecoin price was increased by 5,859% over the past year, according to Coinbase, mostly driven up by Musk’s epic tweets.
January 2022
The Tesla CEO’s announcement on Twitter that "Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin.” sent Dogecoin rocketing 13% higher.
March 2022
The dogefather’s tweet: “As a general principle, for those looking for advice from this thread, it is generally better to own physical things like a home or stock in companies you think make good products than dollars when inflation is high. I still own & won’t sell my Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Doge fwiw." pushed the prices of Bitcoin ($BTC), Ethereum ($ETH), and Dogecoin ($DOGE) cryptocurrencies by 3-4 percent for a brief moment.
May 2022
After the following tweet: “Tesla merch can be bought with DOGE, soon Spacex merch too,” Dogecoin prices climbed from USD 0.078 to an intra-day high of USD 0.085 – recording a jump of 9 percent within minutes.
June 16, 2022
Elon Musk was sued for $258 billion by a Dogecoin investor who accused him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency.
June 21, 2022
Musk himself “never said that you need to invest in cryptocurrency,” and his personal investments are not that significant. However, speaking about DOGE, Musk said that he intends to continue to support the altcoin.
Afterword
Elon Musk has an impressive impact on such crucial to humanity's future fields as the transition to renewable energy sources, space exploration, and the Internet. Musk entered the history with life-changing projects PayPal, Tesla Motors, The Boring Company, Hyperloop, SolarCity, and SpaceX.
Bright and extraordinary people always seem to be a bit strange to others. You can consider Musk as a trickster, an eccentric, or a crazy genius, but the fact remains — he's one of the greatest inventors and $DOGE supporters of our time while having a net worth of $220 billion as of June 2022, making him the wealthiest human on the planet.
What a playful genius visited our planet 51 years ago!
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