Elon Musk Dubs Himself “The Dogefather”

Dogecoin DOGEUSD, 4.59% shot up 32% in the wee hours of Wednesday morning after the billionaire Musk tweeted “The Dogefather” at 2 a.m. EST, a sign of both Musk’s strange power over the Doge community, and another example the volatile digital coin can make huge moves on just an inscrutable celebrity tweet.

Doge, which started as a crypto joke inspired by an internet meme featuring a shiba inu dog, has seen it’s value surge almost 8,000% in 2021, thanks in large part to celebrities like Musk who have given tongue-in-cheek love to what was once a virtually useless digital token.

Musk, the self-appointed Technoking of Tesla, Imperator of Mars and father of 11-month-old son X Æ A-Xii, has had a lot of fun using his massive social media following to pump the price of Doge, tweeting back on April 1 that he would use his SpaceX rockets to put a physical Doge coin on the literal moon, echoing the social media goal of taking the coin’s price “to the moon.”

While Wednesday’s midnight tweet did not mention Tesla’s TSLA, -1.47% quarterly earning result that sent the stock down in after-hours trading despite announcing a 70% rise in sales figures, Musk did promote his May 8 hosting gig on Saturday Night Live.

Showbiz promotion aside, Wednesday’s corresponding Dogecoin move appears to have been one of Musk’s more effective moments of prankery.

Doge devotees have very publicly set a target of $1 for the coin in 2021, a number that might seem extremely modest at first glance but not when viewed through the prism that Doge traded at $0.005 on the final day of 2020.

For those fans, otherwise absurd tweets like Musk are the equivalent of a fundamental market bull signal.

On r/CryptoMoonShots, a Reddit board devoted to cheaper cryptos with so-called “to the moon” potential, users gave Musk just the reception he was looking for.

“You all know what happens when Elon Musk tweets. We all make money,” one user posted early Wednesday. “That’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it will probably keep being, Lol.”