Telsa CEO, Elon Musk who calls himself technoking is been in the spotlight for the last few months when he first announced that Telsa will be accepting bitcoin as a payment option for its electric cars, followed by promoting meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin (DOGE) and calling himself dogefather.
His twitter activities have taken the crypto market on a roller coaster ride. Bitcoin reached an all-time high crossing the $60,000 mark after his Telsa announcement and dogecoin, a joke-based coin with no real value associated, rose by nearly 10000% to reach nearly a dollar mark from being a penny currency followed by his multiple tweets promoting the cryptocurrency.
No one expects a leader and influencer like Elon Musk, to just go and blabber something on social media without putting much thought into the subject matter or without taking advice from experts. His multiple favorable announcements promoting certain cryptocurrencies came to an end when he suddenly took a u-turn on Tesla’s bitcoin payment option citing environmental concerns and CO2 emission over bitcoin mining.
Earlier that week, when his favorite dogecoin was about to hit a $1 milestone, his much-awaited SNL appearance crashed the dreams of dogecoin lovers when he called the currency a hustle on the show.
Also see – Will dogecoin (DOGE) reach $1?
All this happened in May 2021, and after his bitcoin suspension announcement and energy remark, the entire crypto market saw the biggest crash of all time wiping off nearly a trillion-dollar from the market within a week’s time. The crypto market is still recovering from this shock and multiple other FUD that followed Elon’s track like China banning institutions from dealing with crypto and hunting down crypto mining firms in the country. Many mining firms had to shut shop and relocate to other countries to continue their operations. And the whole debate of authenticity and the future of crypto started all over again in the entire world.
Elon Musk’s repeated actions on the crypto world appear to have come at a cost — at least when you look at how people are feeling about him on Twitter. According to data from sentiment tracking company Awario that was shared exclusively with Yahoo Finance a few days ago, shows that the positive-to-negative sentiment of tweets about Musk reached a new low in May.
Awario began tracking Musk’s social media sentiments in October 2020. In January 2021, tweets in favor and against Elon Musk were about equal in number, but by May, the ratio of positive-to-negative sentiment had fallen by about 25% to hit the all-time low ratio. Well, it seems it is also following the bitcoin chart, pun intended. The current stats of his social media sentiments stands at 66% neutral, followed by negative tweets at 19.2% and positive tweets at just 14.9%, respectively.
Although, this doesn’t matter to Elon Musk, and despite negative sentiments, his following increased by 3 million to a total of 56 million now, probably the most followed account among business executives. But it is of concern to Tesla investors. Ross Gerber, a longtime Tesla investor, and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that he thinks Elon is wading into an area that’s maybe not the best set of statements to make. He also warned that manipulating markets and playing with people’s money is a risky strategy for Musk to take.
I think it’s a very dangerous area for Elon to get in when he’s causing people losses like he did the other day and it turns people against him and ultimately Tesla.
Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management
And it’s not just Gerber who is warning Elon but Russell Okung, an American football offensive tackle, launched a billboard campaign featuring himself, suggesting Musk keep out of Bitcoin and focus on space instead. The campaign will run for two weeks in Miami, Florida to coincide with the Bitcoin 2021 conference being held in the city that is starting on 4th June 2021. He also put mobile billboards around SpaceX’s launch site in Texas, and a Tesla facility in California.
