Bitcoin soared 20% on Friday after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio.
The virtual currency rose suddenly at around 3:30 am ET, adding $ 5,000 within the hour to trade at $ 37,299, according to data from the CoinDesk industry website. At 5:17 am ET, he was trading 16% higher, around $ 36,423.
Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio on Friday morning. He also sent a cryptic tweet, saying, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”
This increases wild volatility in the markets this week, with the stock prices of heavily sold companies like GameStop and AMC rising dramatically thanks to a wave of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit WallStreetBets forum.
Another subreddit group, SatoshiStreetBets, led investors to raise the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by the popular meme “doge”. Dogecoin has risen 800% in the past 24 hours at one point.
It is not the first time that Musk’s tweeting habits have led to an increase in the price of an asset. The businessman recently helped extend a GameStop stock price hike after Tuesday’s business hours, after tweeting “GameStonk” and connecting to the WallStreetBets Reddit community.
Meanwhile, Polish CD Projekt’s shares rose 12.6% on Thursday after Musk tweeted that he liked the company’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Musk’s bitcoin addition to his Twitter profile comes after much speculation about whether the Tesla CEO will buy bitcoin or add the cryptocurrency to his electric car company’s balance sheet.
The billionaire made headlines after a Twitter exchange with the CEO of software company MicroStrategy last month after a tweet suggesting he was tempted to buy bitcoin. Along with Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Square, MicroStrategy used its own balance sheet to buy bitcoin last year.
“If you want to do your shareholders a $ 100 billion favor, convert the $ TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC,” said MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor at the time.
In response, Musk said, “Are these big deals really possible?”
MicroStrategy will host an event next week entitled “Bitcoin for Corporations”. When asked by CNBC’s Morgan Brenner, which companies would attend, Saylor simply said there would be “thousands of executives, executives, directors and directors of companies”.