Cryptocurrency: Where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.
That’s the impression one could reasonably arrive at after what happened to Dogecoin following Elon Musk’s Saturday Night Live appearance, anyway. The Tesla CEO’s hosting gig included a sketch where he joked about the meme-based cryptocurrency being a “hustle” and, predictably, its value on Binance dropped from around $0.65 to a low point of $0.47, per Reuters.
That’s a nearly 30 percent drop for the internet funny money, which has had a huge 2021 thanks in part to Musk’s frequent tweets about it. Dogecoin has been around for years, originally established in 2013 as a parody of Bitcoin. But since nothing is real and we can make any cryptocurrency valuable if we just believe hard enough, Dogecoin has soldiered on through the years before finally becoming a digital currency worth paying attention to in 2021.
While there’s no reason to believe the “hustle” line was anything other than a joke for a sketch comedy program, Musk does have a history of dictating market trajectories with public statements.
Tesla stock famously exploded when he tweeted about the publicly traded company potentially going private in 2018, an act that invited the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In other words, when Musk talks about markets (traditional or otherwise), the markets listen.
At least Dogecoin traders got a little bit of Sunday morning excitement out of Musk’s SNL appearance, if nothing else.