It might be April Fools’ Day for a few more hours, but this is no joke.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday (April 1) he would put “a literal Dogecoin” (pronounced “dohj coin”) on the “literal moon.”
SpaceX is going to put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moonApril 1, 2021
Although some questioned whether Musk was joking in light of it being April Fools’ Day and his reputation for making off-the-cuff remarks, others, including CNBC space reporter Michael Sheetz, suggested Musk could very well be telling the truth.
“I know it’s April Fool’s but I don’t for a second question that he means this,” Sheetz tweeted, to which Musk replied: “After all, SpaceX’s first payload to orbit & back was a wheel of cheese.” (SpaceX did in fact deliver a wheel of cheese to orbit in 2010, during a test flight of its Dragon cargo spaceship.)
After all, SpaceX’s first payload to orbit & back was a wheel of cheese …April 1, 2021
The self-proclaimed “techno-king of Tesla,” Musk, 49, is an ardent supporter of cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin and bitcoin. In February, Tesla announced that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin. One month later, Musk said Tesla would accept it as payment for its vehicles.
SpaceX has not yet made a similar announcement.
Related: SpaceX founder Elon Musk is now the richest person in the world
Dogecoin, which originally started as a joke, was created in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. The cryptocurrency, which uses a Shiba Inu as a mascot, is “an open source peer-to-peer digital currency, favored by Shiba Inus worldwide,” a description on Dogecoin.com states.
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The cryptocurrency can be obtained in several different ways: purchased, traded on an exchange or “mined.”
This is not the first time Musk has mentioned Dogecoin’s presence on the moon. In February, Musk tweeted a meme of a Shiba Inu in a spacesuit on the moon holding a Dogecoin flag.
The price of Dogecoin skyrocketed following Musk’s tweet, as its value rose nearly 30% to $0.70 just minutes after Musk’s proclamation.
It’s unclear if Musk was serious about sending Dogecoin to the moon, but the company could potentially make that happen, given its lunar exploration plans.
In August 2020, Space.com reported that SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft could reach the lunar surface with NASA payloads as soon as 2022. And in February, NASA said it would use SpaceX to provide launch services for parts of its ongoing Gateway project, an upcoming outpost that orbits around the moon.
As Business Insider notes, the physical coins are sold as memorabilia but do not function as currency.
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