As of 10 a.m ET., over 28,600 tweets had been sent carrying #Doge4Tesla and it was the 8th highest trending topic on Twitter, according to the social media platform.
The push comes after Musk shared a Twitter poll on Tuesday posing the question: “Do you want Tesla to accept Doge?” Some 3.9 million users have voted so far, with 78.2 percent choosing “yes.”
Shortly after, the price of Dogecoin spiked to $0.52, according to CoinDesk.
On Thursday, fans of the cryptocurrency encouraged one another to use #Doge4Tesla to get the phrase trending, including the Dogecoin Rise account that has over 410,000 followers.
YouTuber Jesse Wellens and MMA fighter Keith Berry—both of whom reference dogecoin in their Twitter bios—were among Twitter users to use the hashtag.
The poll marked the latest chapter in the billionaire’s relationship with the cryptocurrency. Dogecoin started as a joke in 2013, but has gained mainstream attention in recent weeks, partly thanks to Musk joking about it.
Earlier this week, Musk announced on Twitter that his aerospace firm SpaceX plans to launch a satellite named Doge-1 to the moon, as part of a mission funded using the cryptocurrency.
The phrase “to the moon” is used metaphorically by cryptocurrency investors to describe how high they would like coin prices to go.
However, the relationship stems from far beyond this week. In 2019, Musk tweeted: “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.”
This was in response to a joke poll by the Dogecoin Twitter account to vote for a CEO, featuring Musk alongside Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, and Marshall Hayner, co-founder of cryptocurrency wallet Metal Pay.
Musk came out on top, with over 54 percent of the around 4,300 votes.
Musk then continued to hype the coin. Last July, he tweeted an image of a Shibu Inu dog, on which the doge meme is based, taking over the global financial system like a giant dust cloud, besides the words “it’s inevitable.”
And on one particularly active day in February, he tweeted: “Doge,” “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto,” and “No highs, no lows, only Doge.” He also shared an image of the Lion King character Rafiki holding up Simba, with his face over the monkey’s and the Doge meme Shiba Inu dog as the lion cub.
But Musk’s messages have been tempered with denials that he takes it seriously. In an interview on the Clubhouse platform in February, he said: “Occasionally I make jokes about dogecoin, but they are really just meant to be jokes.”
This was followed by him describing it as a “hustle” on the latest episode of Saturday Night Live.
