By Samuel Indyk
Investing.com – The price of Dogecoin rose early on Tuesday after Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk tweeted about whether the company should begin accepting the cryptocurrency as payment.
“Do you want to Tesla to accept Doge?” Musk tweeted to his almost 54 million followers.
At 11:24BST, Musk’s poll on Twitter has almost 1.5 million respondents with over three quarters saying ‘Yes’.
Following the tweet, the price of Dogecoin jumped from around $0.46 to above $0.52.
Musk has been a big proponent of the meme-based cryptocurrency and the recent run up in price came ahead of Musk’s weekend appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Following his TV appearance, Dogecoin fell around 30% as the billionaire called the cryptocurrency a “hustle”, but the price is still up around 11,000% year to date.
If Tesla were to begin accepting Dogecoin as payment for cars it wouldn’t be the only cryptocurrency they accept.
Earlier this year, Tesla announced they had begun accepting Bitcoin as payment for vehicles and had bought $1.5bln of the cryptocurrency to diversify their reserves. A sale of some of the Bitcoin holdings helped the company turn a profit in the first quarter of this year.
At 11:24BST, Dogecoin trades around $0.51, down 1.5% over the last 24 hours but off its lowest levels. Tesla shares were trading lower by around 3.7% in pre-market trade.