Price of bitcoin jumps after Elon Musk says it is 'a good thing'

Bitcoin's prices skyrocketed to above $38,000 on Monday after billionaire CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk said he was a "supporter" of the cryptocurrency.  

A Good Thing

In comments broadcast on social media app Clubhouse on Monday, Musk said "Bitcoin is a good thing", acknowledging that he was late to the bitcoin party. 

Last Friday, Musk changed his biography on Twitter to simply "#bitcoin", leading to a surge in the prices of the cryptocurrency to $38,000. 

Around the same time, he joined the GameStop fad, tweeting "Gamestonk", a play on stock market memes, along with a link to the WallStreetBets forum on Reddit, where users had teamed up to increase the value of the game retailer's shares. 

Musk added in his Clubhouse comments that his tweets about dogecoin, another less popular cryptocurrency, were “really just meant to be jokes”. Whenever Musk tweets about the dogecoin cryptocurrency, which was branded with a Shiba Inu meme, its value has increased markedly. 

Talking Up His Investments

Earlier this year, Nusk became the richest person in the world as the price of shares in Tesla, makers of electric cars rose. Recently, however, he has leveraged the strength of his considerable following to talk up other investments. 

He was one of the characters featured in a Star Wars-style poster, widely shared on the WallStreetBets page on Monday, for an imagined film about the GameStop frenzy. The imagined film was entitled Diamond Hands, a reference to investors who hold on to their extremely risky financial bets even in the most volatile conditions.

Musk has long been comfortable with online culture, with the chief executive regularly posting memes, including related to financial topics. However, it has also got him and his company in trouble on occasion. In 2019 Musk reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission after he tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, which later proved to be false.