Donald Trump’s tweets moved crypto markets, now he’s back
Donald Trump has returned to X (formerly Twitter), and Elon Musk welcomed him back with a personal interview yesterday.
Trump ranks as one of the most impactful tweeters of all time. He famously shifted the market capitalization of Amazon by $5 billion with a single tweet and has moved stock prices intraday of Ford, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, and many other public companies.
His tweets have power.
Case in point, on December 16, 2022, Trump endorsed an NFT collection, Trump Digital Trading Cards. One day later, the floor price of the collection hit an all-time high of 0.84 ETH. Nowadays, those NFTs resell below 0.10 ETH.
Trump also promoted a photo opportunity at a Bitcoin conference: $60,000 for a selfie, $100,000 for a couple’s photo, and $844,600 for a conference roundtable. Although that promotion raised $25 million, those tickets didn’t resell on secondary markets, so there’s no chart to display for this market impact.
Promoters like Martin Shkreli and media outlet Pirate Wires tried to jump onto the Trump crypto bandwagon, launching fake Trump tokens on various blockchains. There are unauthorized tokens with symbols like DJT, MAGA, MAGAA, DMAGA, and TRUMP trading on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Solana, PulseChain, Binance Smart Chain, and other blockchains. There are hundreds of unauthorized, Trump-themed meme coins, but traders should beware.
Read more: The entire DJT token drama in one article
Case study: Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC)
Returning to Trump himself, consider the staggering impact of his tweet on a publicly-traded crypto company that gained fame as Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC).
In 2020, when Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter, the platform’s staff suspended Trump’s account on several occasions. Dorsey eventually personally approved a permanent suspension of his account during the transition of presidential power to Joe Biden in January 2021.
By October 20 of that year, Trump had announced Truth Social. His new social media network was similar to Twitter, had fewer users, leaned Republican, wouldn’t ban the former president, and most importantly, pumped the stock price of DWAC.
Within two days of Trump’s announcement, the company’s shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange spiked from around $10 to $175. Today, those shares trade for less than $25 after a symbol change to DJT.
It was a classic pump and dump and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) eventually charged DWAC insiders with fraud. Commissioners prevailed with a cease-and-desist order and an $18 million civil penalty but opted not to charge Trump personally.
Crypto pays attention as Trump starts tweeting
On October 27, 2022, people began questioning the permanence of Jack Dorsey’s ban after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and took the company private. That speculation became a reality a month later when Musk reactivated Trump’s account. For nearly a year, however, Trump didn’t take advantage of his reinstatement.
Eventually, on August 24, 2023, Trump tweeted an image of his Fulton County, Georgia mugshot alongside various calls to action. The tweet would earn 313 million impressions — one of the most popular political tweets of all time.
Then, once again, Trump went silent. For another 11 months, he didn’t tweet, opting to post to Truth Social instead.
However, for the first time in nearly a year, the presidential candidate with 89 million followers is back.
Elon Musk tried to interview Donald Trump on X
To officially welcome Trump back to the platform, Musk scheduled a live social audio room on X for 8pm New York time on Monday. Right on schedule, the platform crashed.
Complaints rained in. Musk disclaimed responsibility, blaming the outage on a “massive distributed denial of service attack.”
Someone created a Solana meme coin, ‘ELON TRUMP,’ to monetize the event. It was, of course, an unauthorized pump and dump.
Various refreshes of the room summary showed maximum attendees of approximately 210,000 people from 8-8:30 pm. It is unclear how many lucky attendees were actually hearing live audio during that half hour, if any.
Musk restarted the interview at 8:30pm with lobby music. Five minutes later, 850,000 people had joined, but the interview still hadn’t started.
Finally, Musk and Trump began their interview at 8:42 pm, with the attendee count displaying 984,000. Within an hour, listeners crested 1.3 million.
Despite an army of crypto traders listening in, Trump avoided the topic of crypto past 10:37 pm. The two men spoke of the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, immigration, inflation, taxes, foreign policy, armed conflicts abroad, electric generators, global warming, and other non-crypto matters.
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