Dogecoin Soars After Elon Musk Announces Tesla Will Accept DOGE

Dogecoin got a boost Tuesday morning when Elon Musk announced that Tesla will be accepting dogecoin for some products. Musk has just been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and said that DOGE is more suitable for transactions than bitcoin.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced via Twitter that his electric car company will accept dogecoin (DOGE) for some products. In a tweet Tuesday morning, Musk wrote: “Tesla will make some merch buyable with doge & see how it goes.”

The announcement came just one day after Musk was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year and said that dogecoin is better suited for transactions than bitcoin. The Tesla boss noted that BTC is more suitable as a store of value.

The price of dogecoin popped 28.5% from $0.1699 at the time of Musk’s tweet to $0.2183 in just over an hour based on data from Bitcoin.com Markets.

Meanwhile, Tesla still has not resumed accepting bitcoin. The electric car company began accepting BTC in March. However, it stopped accepting the cryptocurrency in May due to environmental concerns. Musk later said that Tesla will resume accepting BTC “When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions.”

Nonetheless, Tesla still holds BTC on its balance sheet worth about $1.26 billion at the end of Q3. The company does not own any DOGE. However, Musk previously said that he personally owns dogecoin, bitcoin, and ether.

Musk has previously hinted that Tesla will accept dogecoin. In May, he set up a poll on Twitter asking his followers if Tesla should accept DOGE. 78.2% said yes. Since then, he has revealed that he sees the meme cryptocurrency as the people’s crypto. In August, he agreed with Shark Tank star Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA team Dallas Mavericks, that “The community for doge is the strongest when it comes to using it as a medium of exchange.”

What do you think about Tesla accepting dogecoin? Let us know in the comments section below.