Dogecoin's value has continued to rise since Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)'s founder Elon Musk tweeted to say the carmaker would accept the digital currency as payment.
The cryptocurrency surged within minutes of Musk’s tweet on Friday, in which he said “Tesla merch can be bought with DOGE, soon Spacex merch too”.
Musk’s tweet was retweeted 20,400 times and quote-tweeted by a further 2,750 users of the social media platform.
Dogecoin lifted to US$0.0825 by 4:30pm on Friday, up from USD 0.0808 an hour earlier.
The price of the cryptocurrency rose again by 2.57% on intraday trading 0.0841 on Monday (by 2:23 pm) after hitting an intraday peak of 0.0859.
Tesla's shares are trading 15.94% higher than they were five days ago, although its shares are down 36% this year to date.
Dogecoin has been a favourite of the Tesla boss for years, even though it originally started life as a joke cryptocurrency.
Musk has been under pressure to buoy shareholder confidence after the news that Tesla's ESG rating had slipped, raising pertinent questions about the social element of its business.
Its S&P rating for environmental, social and governance measures on the SPDR S&P 500 ESG ETF recently fell to 20.41%, down from nearly a full scorecard in 2021, prompting the founder to post a tweet labelling the index a “scam”.
The colourful founder of the electric car brand insisted that the company had done more for the environment than any other business.
However, disputes over alleged racism and deaths in its auto-drive vehicles led S&P to downgrade its ESG score.
Closure of its plant in Shanghai due to Covid has also made investors nervous, though today UBS analyst Patrick Hummel predicted that Tesla would shortly return to its pre-lockdown run rate at its Shanghai plant.
Reuters added that the carmaker was back to 70% of the output at its Shanghai plant before the Covid lockdowns in the city.