Crypto-friendly billionaire Elon Musk is known for his cryptic social media posts. This time, his online activity triggered a dramatic pump-and-dump of cryptocurrency.
On Tuesday, the Tesla (TSLA-5.21%) CEO temporarily changed his profile photo and name on X (formerly Twitter), the platform he owns, to reference a meme-based cryptocurrency called Kekius Maximus. The move skyrocketed the price by 900%, reaching an all-time high of $0.4011.
Adding to the buzz, Musk followed up with a post on X, stating, “Kekius Maximus will soon reach level 80 in hardcore PoE.”
Here, the term “PoE” likely refers to “Path of Exile 2”, a video game Musk is known to play.
However, Musk soon changed his profile picture and name to the original one, causing the cryptocurrency to decline sharply. It is currently trading at $0.1363, representing a loss of over 60% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
The term Kekius is derived from “kek,” an internet slang equivalent to “lol,” while Maximus references the iconic Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius, famously portrayed in the movie Gladiator.
Elon Musk first mentioned the phrase “Kekius Maximus” on December 13, 2024, without offering any explanation for its meaning. However, crypto enthusiasts quickly capitalized on the buzz, launching a cryptocurrency under the same name. According to CoinGecko, a crypto-tracking site, Kekius Maximus was trading at just $0.0006923 on December 17, 2024. Since then, its value has skyrocketed by an astounding 19,877.9%.
This isn’t Musk’s first foray into influencing the crypto world. Time and again, he has used social media to promote phrases or cryptocurrencies, often triggering dramatic price movements.
The most notable example is Dogecoin, the most popular memecoin that gained massive support from Musk in 2021, following the GameStop saga. Musk’s tweets and endorsements helped Dogecoin to become one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
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