Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday that he would eat a Happy Meal if McDonald’s begins accepting Dogecoin as a form of payment.
Dogecoin’s value shot up about 6.5% as of Tuesday afternoon, starting at $0.127 when the market opened and reaching a high of $0.141, according to the Nasdaq.
Musk has been a longtime champion of the cryptocurrency, tweeting, “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto,” last February. Dogecoin started as a spoof coin featuring the face of a Shiba Inu and has steadily risen in value, reaching over ten cents in April of 2021.
Dogecoin was inspired by the popular Doge meme of a Shiba Inu staring sideways at the camera with raised eyebrows, according to the website Know Your Meme.
Dogecoin’s value goes up:Â The price of Dogecoin, created to poke fun at cryptocurrency, is above 10 cents
When asked why he supports Dogecoin, Musk responded on Twitter: “Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge. They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge – it felt like the people’s crypto.”
While McDonald’s did not respond to the tweet, competitors like Burger King and Jack-in-the-Box touted their brands in the comments section.
Musk himself owns Dogecoin, along with other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to a tweet he posted in October 2021.
Despite his tweets on cryptocurrency, Musk encouraged building value over investing heavily in cryptocurrencies, saying in an October 2021 tweet, “True value is building products & providing services to your fellow human beings, not money in any form.”Â
Michelle Shen is a Money & Tech Digital Reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her @michelle_shen10 on Twitter.Â
