Elon Musk supercharges Doge (again) with a flurry of tweets

Tesla chief Elon Musk has taken to Twitter again, giving Dogecoin yet another shameless boost.

The South African entrepreneur playfully tweeted “Baby Doge, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo” – a doff of the cap to the popular ‘Baby Shark’ children’s song – and the meme coin that was launched as joke suddenly jumped more than nine per cent.

The social media shill comes only days after 23-year-old YouTuber Reid Williamson sent a mocked up Dogecoin to the edge of space on a weather balloon in honour of the SpaceX mastermind’s 50th birthday.

Williamson’s team managed to get the balloon high enough in the stratosphere to see the curvature of the Earth.

Musk had earlier tweeted a picture of Marlon Brando’s The Godfather character Don Corleone discussing a coding issue, with the caption “Release the Doge!”.

Created by Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer and software engineer Billy Markus in 2013, Dogecoin was initially designed as a joke. At the time, Palmer ironically tweeted that Dogecoin would be “the next big thing” but later admitted he had no comprehension the coin would go on to cause shockwaves in 2021.

In January, community members of a Reddit sub called ‘wallstreetbets’ pumped stocks of the US gaming merchandise retailer GameStop following a comment from Citron Research which said its value would fall.

Soon after the GameStop incident, r/wallstreetbets rapidly grew by 1.5 million users overnight before members decided to turn their attention to the little-known Dogecoin.

Their actions then pumped Doge by 142 per cent in the space of 24 hours before a handful of influencers and celebrities jumped on the bandwagon – including the self-proclaimed ‘Dogefather’ Elon Musk – and its outrageous rise continued beyond 200 per cent.

Musk recently admitted he was working with Dogecoin developers in order to “improve system transaction efficiency”, adding that he was worried about a “massive increase” in coal and carbon-intensive energy to generate the electricity needed to mine Bitcoin. He also reversed a decision to accept Bitcoin as a payment method for Tesla vehicles – a u-turn which saw the price of Bitcoin plummet.