Billionaire Elon Musk buys Dogecoin for his son X Æ A-Xii

Elon Musk.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk said on February 10 that he had bought Dogecoin - a cryptocurrency - for his newborn, further extending his support to digital currencies.

"Bought some dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler hodler," said the Tesla and SpaceX CEO on Twitter.

Bought some Dogecoin for lil X, so he can be a toddler hodler

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 10, 2021

The announcement, buried deep in Tesla's 2020 annual report, drove a roughly 20 percent surge in the world's most widely held cryptocurrency to over $47,000. At that price, 0.8 bitcoins was enough to buy an entry-level Tesla Model 3.

Musk's tweets about certain companies and cryptocurrencies have sent their prices soaring in recent weeks. In fact, him putting a "#bitcoin" tag on his Twitter bio sent the most popular currency flying on January 29.

The billionaire entrepreneur has nearly 44 million followers on Twitter.

A few days after his namecheck on Twitter, his cryptic one-word tweet triggered a massive rally in Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a meme about a Shiba Inu dog.

Dogecoin's value started to soar after Musk tweeted the image of rocket with a trailing tweet "Doge". This was enough for the cryptocurrency's price to skyrocket.

In his subsequent tweets, Musk wrote "Dogecoin is people's crypto" and "No highs, no lows, only Doge".

Dogecoin, is also among one of the many altcoins. Altcoins is an umbrella term for digital currencies other than the bitcoin, the most well known and popular cryptocurrency.

According to The New York Times, the altcoin Dogecoin was created by Jackson Palmer in 2013. He built his own satirical mash-up cryptocurrency that combined bitcoin with the Doge meme he’d seen on social media.