The price of bitcoin fell on Friday morning after Ilon Musk posted a tweet about his dislike for the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, CNBC writes.
The Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO posted a meme on his account about a couple who break up because of the woman’s dissatisfaction with the man quoting lyrics from the band Linkin Park. He also added the hashtag #Bitcoin and an emoji in the shape of a broken heart.
Bitcoin has since fallen more than 4.5% to $36,852, according to Coin Metrics, and other digital coins followed suit: etherium fell more than 5% to $2656.06, and Dogecoin – Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency – fell nearly 7% to about 36 cents.
Over the year as a whole, bitcoin’s trajectory has resembled a roller coaster: it hit a record high of more than $64k in April before falling to nearly $30k the following month, and is now more than 40% off its all-time high, though it is still up nearly 30% in 2021.
Musk has become famous for changing the direction of cryptocurrencies’ growth with his social media posts. In May, he said Tesla would stop accepting bitcoins as a way to pay for electric cars due to concerns about energy use during coin mining, which reduced the value of the entire crypto market by hundreds of billions of dollars in a single day.