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A few years ago, no one would have expected that a single man would introduce so much volatility into the crypto space. Elon Musk has fulfilled this dastardly role, but everything has its expiration date.
What did Elon Musk do to earn 58 million followers?
Elon Musk got his first major financial breakthrough when he sold his company Zip2 to Compaq in 1999 for $ 307 million. Three years later, as a co-founder of PayPal, he sold it to eBay for $ 1.5 billion. An established business pedigree and these two financial injections were enough for him to focus on more concrete projects:
If you were to create a fictional billionaire character with an exciting past, you wouldn’t want it to be about payment processors or business directories. Instead, it would be transformational technology:
- Electric vehicles that not only didn’t look awkward but, for the first time, could compete with mainstream luxury sports cars.
- Reusable rocket technology, which makes the exit from Earth orbit somewhat cost effective.
- Map the human brain so that it can interface directly with machines, either externally or for bionic prostheses.
Without going into the details of Tesla and SpaceX’s over-reliance on government grants, every level of Musk’s engagement is straight out of a CyberPunk novel. That alone provides a solid foundation for its worldwide notoriety.
However, what Musk is most popular for these days has nothing to do with his primary professional goal. Musk seems to have discovered that harnessing the influence of social media is a great resource.
Elon Musk’s Twitter Footprint
What Google is for search engines, Twitter is for social media. However, when Elon Musk joined Twitter in 2009, it wasn’t as bad as it is today. According to data from Pew Research, only 19% of adults online took advantage of Twitter in the fall of 2009.
Interestingly, this is the same year that Bitcoin was launched. Still, it took more than eight years for Musk to notice its existence. In January 2018, he first mentioned the cryptocurrency concept. A month later, he admitted that he didn’t own any crypto except for some BTC that a friend sent him that he lost.
This was a special admission given that his fortune started in the financial arena, making it easier to execute borderless payments through PayPal. Additionally, for anyone interested in cutting edge technology, it’s curious that he didn’t get into cryptos until the very late stage of adoption in 2018. Until then, Elon Musk’s Twitter had less than 10 million subscribers, generating exponential growth. and the engagement since.
Taking his words for granted, his crypto exposure came from online crypto spammers he met on Twitter. You would expect this vector of exposure for the average Joe, and not for a self-taught, tech-oriented entrepreneur who follows the state of emerging technologies. Either way, the period after 2018 was when Elon Musk started arming Twitter.
On September 29, 2018, Musk was forced to settle a fraud lawsuit with the SEC for violating securities market manipulation with his Tesla tweets. The penalty was $ 40 million, which is 40% of the funds he allocated to Neuralink until July 2019. Since then, his crypto disruption has become more extreme over time.
Is Elon Musk’s crypto manipulation coming to an end?
The Tokenist was one of the first news organizations to note Musk’s corrosive influence on the crypto space as a latecomer, documenting his multiple escapades on both Dogecoin (DOGE) Bitcoin (BTC) fronts. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Tokenist newsletter, you can review Musk’s extensive coverage of disruptions here, to list just a few:
Whether Elon Musk is strapped for billions of green credits or his personality is such as to inherently cause friction is a matter of speculation. The fact remains that it is looser with the SEC’s prosecution stipulation to verify its tweets with lawyers when it comes to cryptos. They may apply to securities, but the crypto space is still largely unregulated, giving Musk a foray into the crypto market shenanigans.
After the most recent crypto-related tweet, another offshoot of Doge – Baby Doge – the coin’s price jumped 127% in one day, gaining another 187% momentum through July 4.e. However, while his influence is still felt on small cap coins, the Bitcoin and DOGE mobs now seem to be done with Musk.
A day after shilling for Baby Doge, his Dogecoin Tweet, depicting a man surrounded by attractive women looking at the DOGE chart, had virtually no impact on its price. It may have something to do with his performance on the SNL sketch.
In the more mature Bitcoin community, other media influencers are ganging up to reduce Musk’s credibility. Bitcoin maximalist Max Keizer, with his 355,000 followers, scheduled an “F * ck Elon Tour” which ended yesterday, July 9th.e.
Hardly anyone brags about Musk’s 58 million subscribers, but dozens of social media influencers are on the same page as Keizer. By wiping out the wealth of thousands of people, Musk had already hit an all-time high in positive-to-negative sentiment in May, according to sentiment monitoring company Awario relayed to Yahoo News.
This disillusion was bound to happen. As the story of the boy who cried wolf tells us – people won’t blindly trust a single voice forever.
If you’ve invested in Tesla or cryptos, have you ever lost or gained from Musk’s presence on Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.
About the Author
Tim Fries is the co-founder of The Tokenist. He has a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Tim was a Senior Associate in the investment team of RW Baird’s US Private Equity division and is also a co-founder of Protective Technologies Capital, an investment firm specializing in detection, protection and protection solutions. control.
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