Inside Elon Musk’s Secret Dogecoin Plan to Save Twitter

Elon Musk boosted Dogecoin's marketcap by $3 billion simply by changing Twitter's logo to a dog. And he did it despite facing a $258 billion lawsuit over manipulating Dogecoin's price.

Ballsy? Yes.

But this is Elon Musk we’re talking about — and he stands to make a lot more than $258 billion if he can pull off his secret plans for Twitter. That might be where Dogecoin comes in.

First off, it's worth considering that Elon's Twitter acquisition has not necessarily gone well. Less than a year after acquiring the social media company for $44 billion, he's already written its valuation down by more than half to just $20 billion. But in true Elon fashion, he has big plans to fix that.

As the New York Times covered last year with details from an investor pitch deck, the core of Elon's turnaround plan hinges on his bread and butter: Payments. If you recall from Musk's early days, he made his first fortune selling his payments company X.com to PayPal with the help of Peter Thiel. Now, he's looking to revive that magic with a scheme to grow payments into a $1.8 billion revenue generator for Twitter. That would be an 86-fold increase from the measly $15 million it does now.

So to get there, Twitter is going to have to add a lot of money functionality — and not just the ability to spend money, but likely ways to transfer money, swap money, maybe even make money. As Custodia Bank's founder Caitlin Long told Coinage after the reports surfaced then, that likely means Twitter might need to build systems well above what's possible with traditional banking rails.

"Those Twitter payments with anybody on Twitter anywhere in the world, guess what? Those are not moving on traditional payment rails. Those are not traditional bank payment systems, so he's working on something big," she said.

While Twitter has since filed for traditional payments licenses, Long posits that Musk will inevitably need to turn to blockchain technology to enable what he's envisioning. But if he's turning to crypto, which network seems most likely?

Musk infamously turned his back on Bitcoin after adding it to Tesla's balance sheet citing environmental concerns he had with the crypto miners still using non-renewable energy sources. And as evidenced by his recent logo swap, he has a well-documented soft spot for Dogecoin.

Interestingly, Musk has also pointed out that bitcoin doesn't make for a great currency given its limited supply cap of 21 million coins. As "digital gold" many people look to just buy and hold bitcoin hoping its value will climb, and as Musk notes, "if a currency is expected to increase in value over time, there’s reluctance to spend it.”

Doge, on the other hand, is essentially a carbon copy of bitcoin just with a far greater supply of tokens, which rises by 5 billion coins a year. It also... has dogs and memes.

"And I love dogs and memes," Musk said on a panel with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey a year before he acquired Twitter.

Of course, you wouldn't be able to miss Elon's love for Doge even if you tried. He has repeatedly tweeted about it, publicly mentioned he bought some for his son, and even hyped it up on a Saturday Night Live skit. It's nearly a guarantee that Elon's antics will move the price of Doge — and that type of pricing power has landed him in the crosshairs of a $258 billion lawsuit, which claims he purposefully pumped Doge only to dump in secret (something Elon's legal team denied in a motion to dismiss.)

Importantly, if you were Elon and you were facing that lawsuit and an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over potentially manipulating the price of Dogecoin, you might have to be extremely careful about future promises you make about it. In fact, in reviewing interviews in which Elon has been pressed about his support for Doge, it's interesting to see his response evolve.

When pressed during an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum nine months ago, Elon defended his Doge pumping by saying it's mostly for his employees who have asked him to do it:

"I just have a lot of people who are not that wealthy who have encouraged me to buy and support dogecoin, so I’m responding to those people. ... Whenever I walk the factory at SpaceX or Tesla they’ve asked me to support Dogecoin, so I’m doing so,” he said. When pressed further on whether his tweets are meant to push the price higher, he simply noted, "I said I'd support Dogecoin and I am doing that."

So, in summary, let's review the facts:

• A) Elon Musk loves dogs and memes

• B) Therefore, Elon Musk loves Dogecoin

• C) Elon Musk and his son own a lot of Dogecoin

• D) Elon's plans for Twitter rely heavily on payments

• E) Twitter just changed its logo to the Doge

• F) Elon is increasingly tight-lipped about Doge

• G) Doge might make sense for Twitter's payment plans

Is it such a leap? Maybe! But maybe not.

Dogecoin originally popped nearly 30% off the latest move to become the current Twitter logo on the site. It has since given back about half those gains and remains up by about 20% on the year compared to a 69% gain for bitcoin, and a 57% pop for ether, respectively.

As a community-owned show observing all these facts, it would be remiss of us if we did not propose a shift to allocate a portion of our treasury to the people's crypto.

As such, Coinage's first community proposal to allocate our treasury to Doge has just gone live on our community voting and scripting platform. Holders of Coinage NFTs are encouraged to vote to make history by inserting yourself into the story everyone in crypto is talking about. Voting on Coinage's proposal will conclude Monday morning.

Watch the video above for more information, or subscribe to Coinage on YouTube.