Maybe because the promised purge of Twitter Blue check marks didn’t really happen, Elon Musk is seemingly trying to draw attention to a change on the platform’s homepage, where the blue bird has been replaced by a cryptocurrency-related image.
Only some verified accounts lost the legacy check mark, including that of the New York Times – which Musk hates. For most, though, nothing changed, as it seems Twitter’s skeleton crew botched the attempt to milk even more cash from users.
This is probably one of the reasons the only visible modification on Twitter happened on Monday when the traditional blue bird icon was switched to a doge, a popular online image of the Japanese breed of Shiba Inu dog that has become synonymous with Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency.
Was this a late April’s Fool’s joke? Might Musk, famous for his childlike behavior online, have decided to project onto users something you cannot mute or block? In any case, a simple icon is surely not a huge issue. It might indeed be just a silly joke: In March 2022, a user suggested that Musk buys Twitter and changes the bird logo to a doge. Elon responded with approval and has now tweeted a screenshot of that conversation with the caption ‘as promised.’
Except that this could mean something more, because Musk asked a US judge on Friday to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the very same Dogecoin.
Specifically, Musk’s lawyers called the lawsuit, brought forward by Dogecoin investors, a “fanciful work of fiction” over the billionaire’s “innocuous and often silly tweets” about the cryptocurrency.
In essence, the lawsuit suggests Musk has been manipulating the price of Dogecoin with his tweets, saying, for instance, that “Dogecoin Rulz” and “no highs, no lows, only Doge.” Musk has indeed previously often tweeted about his support for Dogecoin.
However, now, after the doge image appeared on Twitter’s homepage, the price of this meme-driven virtual coin has gone up by more than 30%. So if Musk and his team of lawyers are trying to show that his memes and jokes do not impact Dogecoin’s price, it seems they actually do.
As an added bonus, searches for "dogecoin" soared 1,992 percent worldwide after Elon Musk changes Twitter’s bird logo to Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu icon, Google Trends data, analyzed by online casino guide 6Takarakuji, revealed.
Investors accused Musk, the world's second-richest person according to Forbes, of deliberately driving up Dogecoin's price more than 36,000% over two years and then letting it crash.
They said this generated billions of dollars of profit at other Dogecoin investors' expense, even as Musk knew the currency lacked intrinsic value. There was also the case of Matt Wallace, a Musk adorer who made wild claims about Dogecoin and was accused of running scams.
Investors also pointed to Musk's appearance on a "Weekend Update" segment of NBC's Saturday Night Live where, portraying a fictitious financial expert, he called Dogecoin "a hustle."
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