Twitter may be falling apart, but Elon Musk is having fun. He has changed his logo to Dogecoin, his fetish cryptocurrency.
It caused the revaluation of the currency, closely linked to the tycoon, who has been denounced for alleged pyramid schemes, by surprising its users without prior notice. The whole thing began with a joke.
Thousands of users were surprised on Monday, April 3, when they opened their Twitter account. The well-known logo of the social network, the bluebird, had been replaced, without prior notice, by a new one: a dog that looks towards the viewer and is very well known to Internet users. It was an Elon Musk joke. But who is that dog and why does he appear there?
The dog, to begin with, corresponds to a popular meme that emerged from two photographs of a Hong Kong Shiba Inu with its own Instagram account, called @balltze. Soon, two of his cute faces were used for what is known as Cheems and, more popularly, “the strong dog and weak dog meme”, which served to ironically confront two contrasting situations.
Balltze went a step further by becoming, against all odds, the face of one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, Dogecoin. Based on Bitcoin, the currency was launched in 2013 by programmer Billy Markus. Elon Musk, Twitter’s current owner, is closely associated with it. But, what is the tycoon intending with this movement?
For now, the dog image as the Twitter logo has made the cryptocurrency appreciate by more than 20% in just a few hours. It has risen from 0.071 euros at 5:35 p.m. Spanish time to 0.092 euros at the moment.
Twitter users could not believe it, and many had even thought that it was a hack of the platform, or that some disgruntled worker had played a trick on the tycoon. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hours later, Elon Musk himself left no room for doubt, publishing, first of all, a meme in which a traffic officer appears checking a driver’s documentation. Who is behind the wheel is the dog in question, who tells the police: “That’s an old photo”, referring to the image that appears in the circulation document: the traditional Twitter logo, with the bluebird.
But then, what is all this business about? The following tweet from Elon Musk seems to indicate the inconceivable reason, inappropriate for an adult in charge of a company of the importance of Twitter. The Tesla owner shows a screenshot showing a Twitter conversation between Musk himself and another user, under the nickname of Chairman. In it, the billionaire wondered: “Is a new social network needed?” to which the tweeter replied: “Buy Twitter”, and added: “And change the bird logo for a dog”. “Ha ha. That would be milk, “replied the tycoon, to whom the idea must have seemed funny. So much so that he has put it into practice months later.
Musk did not end his string of tweets there. “I wish the media would stop flattering me all the time… It’s too much, guys,” he said in a post, ironic about the news on the subject.
