Elon Musk’s tweets have recently been causing huge movements in the crypto market, while his company Tesla’s $1.5 billion bitcoin bet sent the digital currency soaring to record highs.
RT’s Boom Bust sat down with Michele Schneider of MarketGauge.com to discuss Tesla’s move and whether the eccentric billionaire used his earlier Twitter posts to prop up the price of bitcoin for his own benefit.
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“In terms of his ability to manipulate, we know that he has history of talking down his own stock price and then the price goes right back up,” the analyst said, noting that $1.5 billion invested by the carmaker amounts to around one percent of bitcoin’s market cap. “I don’t know if I would necessarily say that this was some grand [manipulation] designed by him to get the bitcoin price after he bought it or whatever.”
However, Schneider noted that Musk certainly can have an impact on the market. That has been acknowledged by the billionaire himself, and he even disappeared from Twitter for a short time, only to return with new tweets that triggered the fresh trading frenzy.
“It is, though, interesting, and when you have a profile like his, that he can at least have some kind of influence on a knee-jerk reaction to what happens to the price of anything he decides to talk about,” she added.
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