Elon Musk Says 'We Should Enable' Dogecoin Payments For Tesla

Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk has long been a proponent of Dogecoin (DOGE), first posting about the project in 2019, saying, "Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It's pretty cool." 

At the time, the project was still relatively unknown, so it took a handful of other posts and a larger crypto bull market for DOGE to truly take off. The token went viral, creating millionaires and making waves in the press. In 2021, the token reached an all-time high of $0.7376. While it sold off after that, it is starting to see a resurgence in 2024. 

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This resurgence was fueled by comments Musk made earlier this week. The Tesla CEO was visiting the Berlin gigafactory, which recently reopened after an arson attack. During a Q&A, someone in the audience asked Musk when they could buy a Tesla with Dogecoin.

"At some point I think we should enable that," Musk said. Musk then repeated the DOGE catchphrase "Dogecoin to the moon," which raised a cheer from the crowd.

Musk also went into detail about why he began supporting and endorsing DOGE in the first place.

"The reason I ended up sort of endorsing Dogecoin is that when I was walking around the factory at Tesla, some people asked me to support Doge," he said. "Then, at SpaceX, some regular guys said, ‘Can you support Doge?’ and I was like, ‘Doge is the people’s crypto, so I will support it.'"

Musk also noted that Tesla merchandise can be bought with DOGE. This adds to the possibility that Tesla could begin accepting it for cars, as it already has systems in place to process DOGE transactions. 

There is more context for crypto as a form of payment at Tesla. In 2021, Musk and Tesla began accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment on Tesla vehicles, but the program was discontinued within a few months. Musk cited environmental factors, saying, "Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel."

This is notable because DOGE is based on Bitcoin and uses most of its codebase. Practically, this means that DOGE uses the same consensus model as Bitcoin, so it also produces high emissions. While DOGE does not create emissions at the same scale as Bitcoin, it could still be a factor that Musk considers when taking a closer look at the potential for a DOGE-payment program.

Despite the past discontinuation of Bitcoin payments, the market took Musks’ comments positively. DOGE was up 15% on the morning of March 14. It will be interesting to see whether Musk takes a deeper look at DOGE and if it can be used to buy a Tesla in the future. 

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