Elon Musk tweet fires up Bitcoin above US$38,000

Bitcoin surged above US$38,000 after Tesla Inc founder Elon Musk mentioned the cryptocurrency on his Twitter profile, Bloomberg reports.

Musk’s page on Twitter simply said #bitcoin with no further explanation, but speculation that the world’s richest man might be a Bitcoin investor was enough to set off a dramatic rally. Prices gained by 15 percent in minutes, the biggest intraday move in almost a year.

Bitcoin pared gains later in the London trading day. The cryptocurrency was up by 9 percent to US$36,197 as of 10:22 a.m. local time, after jumping to US$38,089.

“Obviously this huge melt-up is due to Elon’s tweet,” said Antoni Trenchev, managing partner and co-founder of Nexo in London, which bills itself as the world’s biggest crypto lender. Musk’s support for Bitcoin “creates a safe zone for some of the smaller companies and possibly everyone in the S&P 500 to allocate into Bitcoin,” he said.

Musk also tweeted an image of a “Dogue” magazine cover featuring a whippet in a red sweater – a play on the fashion magazine “Vogue.” He also sent posts calling Cyberpunk a great video game and said, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”

Traders trying to read between the lines of Musk’s tweets interpreted his cryptic messages as support for Bitcoin and Dogecoin, a digital coin originally created as a joke. Dogecoin prices skyrocked higher on Friday, jumping by about 300 percent in the last 24 hours to US$0.04355, according to CoinMarketCap data.