At this year’s Qatar Economic Forum in Doha, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk restated, if evasively, his support for coin cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
“I intend to personally support Dogecoin,” Musk stated in a video interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “I just know a lot of individuals who aren’t that affluent who have pushed me to buy and support Dogecoin—so I’m reacting to those folks.” He added, “Just people when I go around the plant at SpaceX or Tesla, they’ve asked me to promote Dogecoin, so I’m doing it.”
Musk, who has a net worth of well over a fifth of a trillion dollars, was named the world’s richest man by Forbes this year. He has stated that he personally owns Dogecoin, and his tweets about the cryptocurrency have inflated its value. He revealed earlier this year that Tesla and SpaceX will accept Dogecoin payments for some products.
Elon Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX are facing a $258 billion lawsuit, according to Bloomberg, alleging Musk was involved in a racketeering plot to back the cryptocurrency. Musk said at the Qatar Economic Forum, “I have never recommended that people should invest in crypto. SpaceX, Tesla, and I all bought some Bitcoin,” he said, “but it’s a small percentage of our total cash holdings, so it’s not all that significant.”
Musk’s on-again, off-again quest to buy Twitter this year has piqued the interest of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If the transaction is finalised, Musk has stated that he will “integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to move money back and forth,” adding that this will include “currency as well as crypto.”
Musk’s $44 billion acquisition bid was accepted by Twitter in April, but the CEO appears to have had cold feet for the time being. The purchase was “temporarily on hold” until he could verify that fewer than 5% of Twitter users were fraudulent, he stated the following month.
At the Qatar Economic Forum, Musk revealed that there are still “unresolved concerns” on the purchase. In response to his worries, Twitter gave him access to a “firehose” of data, including every tweet ever made on the network, so he could independently verify the scope of bot activity earlier this month. Even if the acquisition falls through, Musk said at the Qatar Forum that he will continue “driving the product” at Twitter, though it’s unclear what form that influence will take.
