Elon Musk is at it again.
The price of Bitcoin was falling on Friday (June 4) after the Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) chief executive officer posted a tweet suggesting he’s fallen out of love with the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Musk tweeted a meme about a couple breaking up over the male partner quoting Linkin Park lyrics, adding the hashtag #Bitcoin and a broken heart emoji.
Bitcoin fell 4% to a price of $36,981 following the tweet. Other digital coins followed suit, with Ether dropping 5% to $2,662 and Dogecoin sinking almost 5% to around 37 cents.
Bitcoin has had a wild year, reaching a record high of more than $64,000 in April, only to plummet to nearly $30,000 the following month. It’s now more than 40% off its all-time high, though still up 30% year-to-date.
It’s not the first time Musk’s tweets about crypto have moved the market. In May, he said that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin as a payment method due to concerns over its energy usage, shaving hundreds of billions of dollars in value off the entire crypto market in a single day.
Some in the cryptocurrency industry have criticized Musk in the past for his posts about digital currencies. Musk’s Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) posts have also affected assets beyond cryptocurrencies. On June 2, shares of Samsung Publishing, a major shareholder in the producer of "Baby Shark," soared after a tweet from Musk about the viral children’s song.
His tweets have attracted the ire of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which in 2018 accused Musk and his electric car firm of committing securities fraud after the CEO tweeted that he would take the company private and had "funding secured" for the deal.
Separately, in a note to clients this week, JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) said institutional investors were not buying the dip in Bitcoin and suggested the digital coin’s prices may have further to fall.
Tech Insider
