For Elon Musk, whose hatred for short-sellers blazes hot enough to reforge Mjölnir a dozen times over, the millions in losses suffered by shorts after the Tesla CEO changed his Twitter bio to “Bitcoin” must make it feel like Christmas and his birthday rolled into one.
That one word bio caused the price of bitcoin to spike to a 10-day high of $38,020 and sparked $387 million worth of short liquidations on major exchanges including Binance, Bitfinex, BitMEX, ByBit, Deribit, FTX, HuobiDM and OKEx.
The crypto market leader is trading at $37,390 at press time, representing a more than 15% gain from the low of $32,000 seen during the European morning session.
However, sentiment turned bullish after Musk changed his Twitter bio and tweeted: “In retrospect, it was inevitable.” The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who has made no secret of his loathing for short-sellers, may not haven intended to have caused the liquidations, but may have popped the cork on a bottle of champagne after viewing the carnage his bio change wrought.
To document Elon’s ostensible nod to the leading cryptocurrency, F2Pool, currently the largest mining pool by hashrate, embedded the tech mogul’s latest tweet in Bitcoin block 668,197.
Google searches for “bitcoin,” a barometer of widespread interest, surged following Musk’s cryptic endorsement of bitcoin. It remains to be seen if increased interest translates into more buying and stronger price gains.
“I assume the U.S. session will try to follow in lock-step of digesting the news,” Vishal Shah, an options trader and founder of derivatives exchange Alpha5 told . “Typically speaking, such things would be met with more muted response. But given the backdrop, I think it could be ripe for a follow-through.”
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