Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk posted a meme depicting Doge on Tuesday (26). Although he directly referred to the Department of Government Efficiency, the Dogecoin memecoin also saw a brief surge.
Is Musk deliberately trying to boost DOGE through these seemingly unrelated tweets? A recent class action lawsuit against him directly addressed this possibility.
Elon Musk e DOGE
There is a clear correlation between Dogecoin (DOGE) and Elon Musk's social media activity. Previously, DOGE began to briefly decline until Musk posted a meme focused on the asset.
Even though the post was clearly about Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), the coin's value increased anyway.
DOGE Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
The rally proved to be short-lived, but it was still a noticeable correlation. So the question quickly arose on social media: was Musk deliberately trying to boost Dogecoin?
On several recent occasions, the memecoin’s value has surged following Musk’s social media posts. In September, he also posted about D.O.G.E., but it only indirectly boosted the cryptocurrency.
In fact, it’s impossible to definitively understand Musk’s intentions with his post. Recently, all of Musk’s statements related to Doge have referred to the political project, not the cryptocurrency. If he was trying to boost the value of the memecoin, he wasn’t very successful: that growth stalled and fell again within a few hours.
Appointments and the fine line between humor and manipulation
However, there is a plausible alternative explanation for this behavior. Last week, Dogecoin investors dropped a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk over this exact issue. These investors accused Musk of deliberately manipulating DOGE’s price since 2021, alleging fraud and insider trading.
Elon Musk literally named a government department ‘Doge’ so he can post about it again whenever he wants without getting in trouble, said the X account ‘Sir Doge of the Coin’.
Musk is a meme aficionado who may have an appreciation for Doge regardless of the asset or agency. After all, the underlying meme has been around since 2013 and could exist outside of either of those two contexts.
However, if Musk was accused of criminally manipulating Dogecoin prices with his posts, then the name D.O.G.E. could be an easy solution. By naming the agency like this, Musk would have plausible deniability that he is not talking about the crypto asset. Whether or not Musk is signaling to Dogecoin traders, there is no way to definitively establish his real intention.
The article Musk criticized for manipulation after DOGE posts appeared first on BeInCrypto Brasil.
