Tips:
- It was recently learned that Elon Musk had offered to buy all of Twitter at a price higher than that offered by the market, with the intention of taking it off the stock market and adapting it to his vision, making its code public on Github.
- The move was called by Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer a hostile takeover with little prospect of anything positive.
- Elon Musk has been a big proponent of Dogecoin on social media. Mostly on Twitter.
News of Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter has the tech and crypto world in an uproar. Many see him as a movement for free speech, while others see him as a billionaire taking over a space. for public debate (managed by a company).
Someone unimpressed with the Tesla CEO’s plans for Twitter is the co-creator of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
“It takes some impressive mental gymnastics to associate any kind of ‘freedom’ with the world’s richest man launching a hostile takeover and forcing one of the largest public social media platforms private,” Jackson Palmer tweeted.
https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1514634090049273859
Since April 2019, Musk has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for Dogecoin, his tweets moving the Dogecoin price needle multiple times. Dogecoin reached an all-time high of $0.73 on May 8, 2021; the same day Musk hosted “Saturday Night Live.” (It then sank to $0.43 overnight.)
But with all that Musk has done to pump up the price of Dogecoin, it’s notable that one of Dogecoin’s creators would speak out against his bid to take Twitter private, but perhaps not surprising considering Palmer has been critical of cryptocurrency and its supporters for some time.
In a Twitter thread posted on July 14, 2021, Palmer expressed his opinion on the industry.
“After years of study, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalist technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its supporters through a combination of tax evasion, decreased regulatory oversight, and artificially imposed scarcity,” he wrote.
Palmer went on to say that he believes the cryptocurrency market is controlled by “a powerful cartel of wealthy figures” and that it makes funneling profits to the top more efficient. Palmer says that he will never return to cryptocurrency.
Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus launched Dogecoin in 2013 as a joke, poking fun at the nascent cryptocurrency industry by using the Shiba Inu “puppy” meme. Since then, the original coin meme has amassed a huge following online and has become the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, at $19.06 billion. Worth less than a cent for most of its history, it is currently trading at $0.14, according to CoinMarketCap.com.