Breaking: Dogecoin Surges 34% on Hype Over Elon Musk's Plans for Newly Purchased Twitter

Dogecoin surged today when Twitter announced it accepted Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase price.

Monday afternoon, Twitter announced in a press release it had entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Elon Musk's for $44 billion. The agreed upon price per share was $54.20, representing a 38% premium above the Twitter stock price on April 1, 2022, according to the statement.

"The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon's proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders," said Bret Taylor, Twitter's Independent Board Chairperson in the statement.

Musk has strong feelings about Twitter

Through multiple Twitter posts over the past few weeks, Musk chided Twitter management for censoring and shutting down various users for allegedly violating the platform's discussion standards and guidelines, asserting that Twitter's efforts stifled freedom of speech.

"Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential -- I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it," Musk was quoted as saying in the statement.

Could Dogecoin be the official crypto of Twitter?

According to CoinMarketCap.com, the dog-themed cryptocurrency, Dogecoin (DOGE), spiked as much as 34% today on the news, with eye-popping trading volume averaging more than 882% across the cryptocurrency exchanges where DOGE is traded. The intraday pump in price and popularity is most likely due to the fact that Musk has been a long-time, ardent supporter of DOGE. During the past weeks and months, he has publicly suggested that Twitter adopt DOGE as payment for pro subscribers, as a tipping feature to content creators as well as other possibilities

It's worth noting that during an interview for a TIME article, in which Musk was named the 2021 Person of the Year, the Tesla CEO said DOGE was a superior form of digital payment compared to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has the largest market valuation of any crypto and is more than 30 times the market value of DOGE, according to CoinMarketCap.com -- still Musk prefers Dogecoin for payments.

While completely speculative, possible use cases of DOGE for Twitter could be the creation of a Dogecoin-centered digital wallet or full-blown DOGE-based payment platform that could be free to Twitter users. Lest we forget, Musk made his first millions as a co-founder of PayPal, so he is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to digital payment platforms.

No one knows for sure what's next for Twitter, its management team, or what Musk has in store for Twitter. However, one thing we do know for sure is the social media platform he'll use to tell us.