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Elon Musk Warns Cryptocurrency Investors To Be Cautious Ahead Of ‘SNL’ Appearance

Bruce Haring
·2 min read

Elon Musk’s guest-hosting appearance on this week’s Saturday Night Live has already caused a stir among the cast and the easily outraged. It’s also affecting the price of one of his major cryptocurrency interests, so much so that he warned investors Friday to be careful.

Musk is a major supporter of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that’s up more than 14% today. Speculators are betting that Musk will say something on SNL that will send the digital currency soaring. He’s hyped the currency in the past, with Doge rising significantly after his prompts.

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Such market manipulation is a grey area in cryptocurrency investing. Doge, like its rivals bitcoin, ether and Litecoin, is not currently considered a security by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock market and prosecutes those who manipulate those holdings.

But cryptocurrency is a largely unregulated marketplace at present. Thus, it’s not a violation to tout a particular coin. That’s led to speculators pumping up Musk’s appearance.

Musk tried to put the brakes on that today before his appearance tomorrow on SNL.

“Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution!” the Tesla CEO tweeted early Friday morning to his 53 million Twitter followers. He added a video from February in which he told TMZ, “First of all, I think people should not invest their life savings in cryptocurrency, to be clear. I think that’s unwise.”

He added that putting money into cryptocurrency “should be considered speculation at this point.”

Dogecoin, which started as a joke, is now up more than 10,000% since the beginning of the year, according to media outlet Coindesk.

Musk has beaten the drums for Dogecoin on Twitter for months, at one point changing his Twitter bio to read, “Former CEO of Dogecoin.”

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