Dogecoin Pops 4% on Elon Musk Tweet

Popular dog-themed cryptocurrency dogecoin (DOGE) jumped about 4% in a handful of minutes following a tweet mention from Elon Musk.

DOGE's price spiked to as high as $0.072 from $0.069 late Wednesday morning after Musk's post. The token just as quickly pared some of its gains and was trading at just under $0.070 at press time, still ahead about 2% over the past 24 hours.

Shiba inu coin (SHIB), the second largest dog-themed crypto by market value after DOGE, also experienced a bump in price but has since mostly retraced that move.

Elon Musk has a long history of making public comments about crypto in general and dogecoin in particular, and markets have just as long of a history in quickly reacting to those comments. Last week, artificial intelligence-related tokens surged on the news about Musk unveiling an AI-focused venture to take on popular chatbot ChatGPT.

There is speculation in crypto circles that Musk might be a large DOGE holder given his particular interest in the token. Notably, he dedicated a segment to it on his appearance on "Saturday Night Live" show in 2021 May, which coincided with DOGE hitting its all-time high price of 73 cents, according to CoinGecko. The token has lost some 90% of its market value since then.

Interestingly, Musk's comments today come ahead of Tesla (TSLA) second quarter earnings report later Wednesday afternoon. At the automaker's Q2 earnings report one year ago, the company announced the sale of some of its bitcoin holdings.

UPDATE (Jul. 19, 16:43 UTC): Corrects recent pricing of DOGE, adds SHIB price move, context about Musk's crypto comments.