As The Bitcoin Price Blasts Through $60,000, Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk Is

Bitcoin has broken through $60,000 amid a huge bull run partly fueled by Tesla

TSLA
billionaire Elon Musk—despite warnings from fellow billionaire Bill Gates.

The bitcoin price broke the psychological barrier early Saturday morning, returning to its blistering early-2021 bull market after taking a breather over recent weeks.

Ahead of bitcoin’s surge over $60,000, Tesla chief executive Elon Musk—who has been known to move the bitcoin price with his tweets—called on the popular bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to support the meme-based dogecoin.

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“Do you think Coinbase should enable dogecoin on their platform,” a Twitter user asked in response to Musk tweeting: “BTC (bitcoin) is an anagram of TBC (The Boring Company). What a coincidence!”

“Yes!”—was Musk’s reply. Dogecoin has added almost 10% since then, although Musk’s ability to move the dogecoin price appears to have diminished recently.

The San Francisco-based Coinbase, set to go public in a blockbuster $100 billion listing, currently supports 49 different cryptocurrencies to varying degrees but has so far declined to list the Shiba Inu-inspired dogecoin.

Interest in dogecoin has exploded as bitcoin, by far the biggest cryptocurrency with a total value of around $1.1 trillion after its latest surge, has climbed thanks to a combination of Wall Street institutional adoption, corporate interest, and retail traders piling into the market.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla set the bitcoin and cryptocurrency market alight when it revealed it had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin last month.

Dogecoin, a 2013 clone of bitcoin that was described as a “joke” by its creator soared at the beginning of February, climbing to a total value of over $10 billion thanks to a meme-based campaign that counted the likes of billionaire tech investor Mark Cuban, rockstars and YouTubers among its supporters.

However, Musk, who was voted dogecoin CEO in a 2019 Twitter poll, has previously said all of his dogecoin-related tweets are not meant to be taken seriously.

“Occasionally I make jokes about dogecoin, but they are really meant to be jokes,” Musk said last month, speaking during an interview on the invite-only chat app Clubhouse.