When Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a kitchen sink Thursday (Oct. 27) it was hard not to wonder how the buyer’s remorse was going to affect his stewardship of the third major company of which the Tesla and SpaceX founder is now CEO.
Also, his Twitter bio now reads “Chief Twit.” It’s not like he needed a way to get his thoughts out and communicate with the world, as his Twitter follower count had not gone up that much to reach its current 110 million.
There are a lot of potential consequences from Musk’s total control over Twitter. Will he replatform banned tweeters ranging from former President Donald Trump on down? Will his attention being divided between three companies hamper his ability to run any of them to the best of his ability?
Related: Musk’s Lawyer Urges Judge To Delay Twitter Trial
One thing that’s certain, however, is Musk’s oversight of Twitter is going to have a big impact on the use of cryptocurrencies for payments, to say nothing of their prices.
Musk has proven in the past that he’s able to shift the value of bitcoin by billions of dollars with a single tweet, and his interest in dogecoin has built it from a created-as-a-joke memecoin into a top-10 cryptocurrency that crypto payments tech providers and payments processes have had to support based on sheer consumer demand.
Dogecoin’s price spiked more than 30% after Musk closed the deal, and that’s probably not all just irrational exuberance. One of the first tweets he sent when word of the deal broke earlier this year was to suggest that dogecoin would be usable for purchases on the social media platform.
He also had Tesla buy $1.5 billion in bitcoin for its treasury, even though his promise to hold onto it did not survive the need to “maximize our cash position” amid China’s COVID-19 lockdowns.
Twitter’s now-fired senior leadership had already embraced crypto payments, with Stripe announcing April 22 that Twitter would be the first client of its new cryptocurrency support. The deal, Twitter Director of Product Management Esther Crawford said at the time, would allow Twitter “to begin offering crypto payouts to creators via Stripe so they have more choice in how they get paid.”
