Dogecoin Surges 23%, Unphased by Musk's Announced Delay to Buy Twitter

Dogecoin is up this morning despite a tweet from Tesla's CEO that he's temporarily suspending his intended purchase of the social media platform.

The price for the dog-themed digital asset -- Dogecoin (DOGE) -- has been pumping across cryptocurrency exchanges, reaching an intraday high of $0.09425, marking a 23% increase over the past 24-hour stretch, according to CoinMarketCap. That increase follows a ruff…or rather rough week for the doggie crypto, which lost more than 25% during the crypto collapse over the past seven days.

Interestingly, DOGE's price action today seems completely unaffected by a significant announcement this morning from Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted to his 92 million Twitter followers that he planned to paws…or rather pause his purchase plans for the social media platform.

"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk posted at 5:44 a.m. EST today.

The price of Twitter's stock (NYSE: TWTR) was down 9% on the news at $41.01 per share at the time of writing, according to Yahoo! Finance. Twitter announced in a press release last month that 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 that announcement.

DOGE is not taking Musk's tweet lying down

Many deal watchers had predicted that Musk's favorite crypto would play some kind of role in his reconfigured version of Twitter. The meme crypto surged at each announced milestone as the purchase talks progressed, and that's largely due to Musk's ongoing -- almost rabid -- public support of DOGE as a superior form of digital payment compared to current crypto king, Bitcoin.

Some of the speculated uses for DOGE on Twitter have included using it as a way for Twitter to take a bite out of the trillion-dollar digital payment market globally, or as the basis for a digital wallet, or merely enabling Twitter advertisers and subscribers to use the canine crypto for payments.

We'll have to see if Musk closes the Twitter deal and then lets it go to the Dogecoin dogs, or if he ultimately decides he's barking up the wrong tree with this deal and walks away from Twitter altogether.