Meme cryptocurrency, Shiba Inu, meme coin: Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout Gives Wings To Dogecoin's Price

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Elon Musk has played a big role in the rise of dogecoin since its lighthearted launch.(File)

It's no joke. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter has put fresh wind in the sails of dogecoin, the meme cryptocurrency he catapulted to fame.

Dogecoin's price doubled after the Tesla tycoon completed the $44 billion deal. It was trading at about $0.07 on Oct. 27 before Musk tweeted "the bird is freed" to announce his ownership. Five days later, it was at $0.16.

That may not sound like much, but it gave the highly volatile cryptocurrency a market value of $21 billion, according to data platform CoinGecko.

Not bad for a coin that was created as a "joke" satirizing wild speculation in the crypto market and named after an internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog.

"Trading dogecoin around Elon tweets has become a lucrative form of speculation," said Matthew Dibb, chief operating officer of Singapore-based crypto investment manager Stack Funds.

Musk has indeed played a big role in the rise of dogecoin since its lighthearted launch by two software engineers in 2013. His tweets expressing support for the coin, including one calling it the "people's crypto", helped its price come from almost nowhere to surge about 4,000% in 2021.

Crypto watchers said the latest price jump, following the Twitter deal, was fuelled by investor bets that Musk would make doge a part of the platform's payments system.

"There's a lot of speculation that Twitter will provide a test bed for doge adoption and experimentation for different uses," Dibb added.

Doge and Shib

Dogecoin has since lost some of its gains and is hovering at about $0.12, which makes it the eight-biggest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of around $16 billion, according to CoinGecko.

The so-called meme coin hit a