A biography of billionaire investor Elon Musk reveals details about his involvement in the Dogecoin project and an idea to launch a social media platform based on blockchain. The book, which should be available later this month, also mentions a failed attempt by former crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried to help Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Elon Musk Considered Creating Blockchain-Based Social Media Platform With Payments
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has been quietly funding the development of Dogecoin, according to a new biography of the owner of Spacex and Tesla which will be published on Sept. 12. The cryptocurrency, which started as a joke a decade ago, owes a great deal of its popularity to Musk who also established himself as a crypto influencer.
Elon Musk’s comments about dogecoin (DOGE) have been suspected of moving its market. In a class-action lawsuit involving the meme coin earlier this year, plaintiffs accused him of insider trading and inflating the price of the crypto. In late March, Musk sought to end the $258 billion suit, insisting that tweeting in support of dogecoin wasn’t unlawful.
The billionaire had dubbed himself “The Dogefather” in a tweet promoting a Saturday Night Live appearance in May 2021 while this year he changed Twitter’s blue bird logo to the Shiba Inu logo of Dogecoin. He bought the microblogging and social networking service for $44 billion last year and recently rebranded it to X.
In a post on X this Saturday, Chinese crypto journalist Colin Wu, also known by his handle Wu Blockchain, turned followers’ attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal published ahead of the upcoming release of the “Elon Musk” biography. In the piece, the author Walter Isaacson provides an excerpt from his work.
Wu Blockchain also highlighted that Musk considered launching a new social media platform based on blockchain that would incorporate payments. The idea came from his brother, Kimbal. According to the quoted text, Elon Musk pondered “half-jokingly” that the network’s payment system could be using dogecoin. In August, he said that X will “never” launch its own token.
A failed attempt by the discredited founder and ex-chief executive of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), to invest $5 billion to help acquire Twitter has been also described in the biography. In November 2022, soon after the collapse of the crypto trading platform, Musk stated that neither he nor Twitter had ever taken an investment from SBF or FTX. “Let’s just give him an adult timeout in the big house,” Musk tweeted in December, backing a call for Bankman-Fried to be jailed.
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