Inside Elon Musk's Dogecoin Plan to Save Twitter
Twitter now hinges on getting into payments. Could that also hinge on Dogecoin?
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.