Elon Musk is an entrepreneur, programmer, investor, inventor, and one of the richest people on the planet. This South African man, born in Pretoria in 1971, He is known today for his enormous fortune and for founding and leading several technology companies considered innovative in their fields.
But, without a doubt, his most recent fame comes from creating a agency promoted by the White House called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, for its acronym in English. Is it a coincidence that its acronym is the same as the native token of the Dogecoin blockchain on which this digital asset runs? No one has said anything about it. The truth is that The story of Elon Musk and cryptocurrencies It is older than the arrival, on January 20, 2025, of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
Did Elon Musk own Bitcoin before becoming a millionaire?
This question comes to the fore today as Musk not only emerges as a successful millionaire entrepreneur, but also becomes part of the close team of advisors to the President of the United States, Donald Trump.
But the answer is noIn 1999, he sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million, and in 2002 he sold PayPal for $1.500 billion. That is, Elon Musk was already amassing a huge fortune when Bitcoin was born in 2009.
However yeah bought a large amount of BTC tokens long before entering the Forbes list of the richest people on the planet, which occurred in 2012 and is a rather murky subject.
Elon Musk and 6 crypto milestones
Hay Six moments in the history of digital assets in which Elon Musk was the protagonist of events that boosted and collapsed the price of various cryptocurrencies and they are these:
- BTC bullshit: This happened on December 20, 2020, when the CEO of Tesla responded to then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bitcoin enthusiast, saying that this digital asset was fake and meaningless, just like fiat money like the dollar or euro.
- Testa and his $1.500 billion in BTC: Just 4 weeks after calling BTC bullshit, the electric car company Tesla, guided by Musk, announced that would invest 1.500 billion dollars in the purchase of this digital asset. The markets exploded and the price of this reached a all-time high of $58.000 per unit. It was confirmed that this was an attempt by the businessman to lower prices and thus make this investment.
- Dogecoin to the moon! on February 4, 2021, Elon Musk The price of a crypto asset has once again been impacted. This time, it was DOGE, which saw a price increase of more than 50%. The tweet from the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX literally called this token "the people's cryptocurrency" because it is accessible to everyone.
- The lawsuit for 258.000 million dollarsOn May 14, 2021, Musk tweeted again that he was “working with DOGE,” a token he described as a digital asset “with a promising future.” Following this, Venture capitalist Keith Johnson filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk for $258.000 million, accusing him of manipulating the DogeCoin market. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, and in August of that year, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed it.
- Musk on Saturday Night Live: On May 8, 2021, Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live, where he discussed Dogecoin and its native token, DOGE. Although his opinion was expected to be positive and drive up the cryptocurrency's price, The businessman said that DOGE was "a scam"» and immediately afterward, while the show was taking place, the cryptocurrency plummeted by 30%.
- Tesla and the DOGE melodrama: on December 14, 2021, Elon Musk announced on your Twitter account that Tesla reportedly begins accepting Dogecoin (DOGE) as a form of payment. This drove up the price of the meme token. However, the joy was short-lived and DOGE fell again when it was learned that this payment option was limited to certain specific goods and did not include the purchase of vehicles, especially the Tesla Model 3, highly sought after for its time.
Strategy, erratic statements, special conditions, or just the fun of an eccentric millionaire?
As of today, Elon Musk He is one of the most influential people when it comes to the price of various cryptocurrencies. He has never admitted the date or how much of his personal capital he has invested in them. However, it is believed that since 2009, when Bitcoin was born, the South African businessman has allocated part of his fortune to various virtual assets.
With a single tweet on the social network Twitter, today called X and owned by him, It is capable of taking the price of digital assets to the moon or crashing., highly susceptible to volatility linked to investor confidence.
Much has been speculated about the motivations behind his actions. Following his public declaration that has Asperger's syndrome, a condition that is part of the autism spectrum on the show Saturday Night Live in May 2021, some analysts allude to his performances to this.
However, Many people rushed to defend this condition claiming that every Asperger, even if he or she has communication difficulties and is neurodivergent, differentiates good and evil and the intentionality of actionsExperts also claim that Musk suffers from bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings. But there's no confirmation of this.
In the current political and economic landscape with Trump and Musk at the head of changes from the Oval Office Many other analysts believe that the South African tycoon is simply a plutocrat, who according to the New York Times, “has defied the authority of Congress and potentially violated public service protections.”
