Bitcoin shot up 20% on Friday after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio.
The virtual currency suddenly climbed around 3:30 a.m.ET, adding $ 5,000 in an hour to trade at $ 37,299, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. At 5:17 a.m.ET, it was trading up 16% at around $ 36,423.
Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio earlier Friday morning. He also sent a cryptic tweet, saying, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”
It’s adding to the wild volatility in the markets this week as the stock prices of high-short companies like GameStop and AMC have risen dramatically thanks to a flow of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit forum WallStreetBets.
Another subreddit group, SatoshiStreetBets, led investors to pump up the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by the popular “doge” memo. Dogecoin is up 800% at some point in the last 24 hours.
It’s not the first time Musk’s tweeting habits have led to an increase in the price of assets. The entrepreneur recently helped extend GameStop’s share price from Tuesday night after tweeting “GameStonk” and linking to the WallStreetBets Reddit community.
Meanwhile, shares of Polish CD Projekt were up a whopping 12.6% Thursday after Musk tweeted that he liked the company’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Musk’s addition of bitcoin to his Twitter profile comes after much speculation as to whether Tesla’s CEO will buy bitcoin or add the cryptocurrency to his electric car company’s balance sheet.
The billionaire made headlines after a Twitter exchange with the CEO of software company MicroStrategy last month, after a tweet suggested he was tempted to buy bitcoin. Last year, MicroStrategy, along with Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Square, used its own balance sheet to buy bitcoin.
“If you want to do your shareholders a favor of $ 100 billion, convert the $ TSLA balance from USD to #BTC,” said Michael Saylor, MicroStrategy boss at the time.
In response, Musk said, “Are such large transactions possible at all?”
MicroStrategy is holding an event entitled “Bitcoin for Business” next week. When CNBC’s Morgan Brenner asked him which companies would attend, Saylor simply said there will be “thousands of company executives, officers and directors and advisers.”