Elon Musk breaks Twitter silence with tweets praising cryptocurrency dogecoin

Elon Musk has broken his self-imposed Twitter silence with a host of tweets about the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

While he used his first tweet back to post about the launch of new Starlink satellites, he quickly moved on to endorse Dogecoin, which is both something of a joke and a real and functioning cryptocurrency.

It has become a particular point of interest in the wake of the GameStop affair, as the retail investors who initially showed interest in a series of specific stocks moving more widely to endorse certain metals and digital currencies.

Mr Musk had said on Tuesday said he would be "off Twitter for a while". The break appears to have lasted less than two days, and he returned with a series of posts about the cryptocurrency.

"Dogecoin is the people’s crypto," he wrote on Twitter. "No need to be a gigachad to own.

"No highs, no lows, only Doge."

He then posted a picture of himself that included the Shiba Inu dog at the centre of the doge meme, which is also the logo for the cryptocurrency itself.

The posts had received tens of thousands of retweets within minutes of publishing.

As usual, the tweets led the price of the dogecoin to surge. It was up more than 75 per cent soon after Mr Musk's tweets.

Most large cryptocurrencies were also up on Thursday, with bitcoin up just under 25 per cent and ethereum up over 30 per cent.

Dogecoin has had a volatile few days, following the GameStop affair and earlier interest from Mr Musk. The price surged as much as 800 per cent last week.

In a discussion on social app Clubhouse, in which he had also explained his love for memes and the fact he has a "happy" monkey that can play computer games with his mind, Mr Musk had expanded on his interest in Dogecoin.

“Occasionally I make jokes about Dogecoin but they are just meant to be jokes," he said.

“[But] fate loves irony...

“The most entertaining outcome is often the most likely and arguably the most entertaining outcome, and most ironic outcome would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future."