Did It Manipulate Prices Again?

Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk posted a meme depicting Doge today. Although he directly referred to the Department of Government Efficiency, the meme asset Dogecoin also pumped briefly.

Is Musk deliberately trying to boost DOGE through these seemingly unrelated tweets? A recent class-action lawsuit against him directly addressed this possibility.

Elon Musk and DOGE

Today, there apparently exists a clear correlation between Dogecoin (DOGE), a prominent meme coin, and billionaire Elon Musk’s social media activity. Earlier, DOGE briefly began trending down until he posted a doge-centric meme.

This meme directly referenced Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), but the coin’s value nevertheless increased.

This DOGE price bump proved short-lived, but it was still a noticeable correlation. A clear question arises: was Musk deliberately trying to boost DOGE?

On several recent occasions, the value of this meme coin has risen after Musk’s social media posts. In September, he clearly posted about D.O.G.E., which also boosted the unrelated cryptoasset.

Ultimately, it is impossible to definitively understand Musk’s intentions with his post. Recently, all of Musk’s Doge-related statements have referred to the political project, not the cryptoasset. If he was trying to pump the meme coin’s value, he wasn’t very successful: this growth flatlined and dropped again within hours.

There is, however, an alternate plausible explanation for this behavior. Last week, Dogecoin investors dropped a class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk over this exact issue. These investors accused Musk of deliberately manipulating DOGE’s price since 2021, alleging fraud and insider trading.

“Elon Musk literally named a government department ’Doge’ so he can post about it again whenever he wants, without getting in trouble,” X account ‘Sir Doge of the Coin,’ said.

Musk is a documented meme aficionado who may have a Doge appreciation independent of the asset or agency. After all, the underlying meme has existed since 2013 and can exist outside either one of these two contexts.

However, if Musk has been accused of criminally manipulating Dogecoin prices with his posts, then D.O.G.E.’s name could be an easy solution. By naming the agency thus, Musk would have plausible deniability that he isn’t talking about the cryptoasset at all. Whether Musk is or isn’t signaling to DOGE traders, there’s no way to establish his actual intent definitively.