In advance of his controversial hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, Elon Musk has combined show promotion with a crypto plug for one of his favorite investments—the meme currency Dogecoin—which immediately shot up.
At about 2:20 a.m. Wednesday morning, Elon Musk tweeted about the episode he will host next week: “The Dogefather,” he wrote. “SNL May 8.”
Within minutes, the price of Dogecoin, which Musk has frequently plugged, jumped from $0.26 to $0.31—a leap of nearly 15 percent.
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Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency started as a joke based on the old meme of a Shiba Inu in 2013. Despite its trolly origins, the coin has rallied in recent months, soaring in price by more than 6,000 percent as investors throw real money at it—often to make similar jokes.
In the days before the stoner holiday April 20, for example, investors tried to push the price up to 69 cents—a play on the joke date 4/20/69. The price peaked at $0.40, but some investors still walked off with nearly five times their money.
Musk has made a bit of plugging the coin, and the price often reacts. On April Fool’s Day, he tweeted that his private space travel company, SpaceX, was “going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon.” In the aftermath, the price jumped by 32 percent.
Musk’s Twitter brags have gotten him in trouble before. In 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the CEO for tweeting that he had secured funding to take Tesla private when its share price reached $420. They later reached a settlement, requiring Musk to secure permission before tweeting about investment information.
The announcement that Musk would host the May 8 episode had already been received with some irritation by current SNL cast members. Actor Bowen Yang shared an Instagram story of one of Musk’s tweets, writing “what the fuck does this even mean.”
His castmate Andrew Dismukes wrote on a different story, “Only CEO I wanna do sketch with is Cher-E Oteri," referring to the show’s former cast member Cheri Oteri. Actress Aidy Bryant posted a picture of a Bernie Sanders tweet, decrying the imbalance between the bottom 50 percent of Americans, and the top 50 richest people—of which Musk is second. According to The Wrap, Yang and Bryant’s posts later appeared to have been deleted.
Neither Musk nor SNL immediately responded to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
