New York () — The traditional Twitter bird icon disappeared and was replaced with the famous image of a Shiba Inu dog, in an apparent nod to dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that was created from a joke and for which Elon Musk, CEO of the social network He is facing a lawsuit.
Musk referred to the change Monday afternoon by tweeting “as promised,” along with an image from a conversation from a year ago in which another user suggested the billionaire “just buy Twitter” and “change the bird logo a doge” (referring to the dog).
The doge logo appeared on Twitter two days after Musk asked a judge to throw out a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to back dogecoin, according to Reuters.
Lawyers for Musk and Tesla called the dogecoin investors’ lawsuit a “fanciful work of fiction” about Musk’s “innocuous and often silly tweets.”
It was unclear if the logo change was permanent. Musk has been known to use Twitter to “troll” both his fans and his critics.
The usually volatile price of dogecoin has risen more than 20% in the last 24 hours to about 9 cents. It was trading at just under 8 cents this Monday morning.
Dogecoin was created on December 6, 2013 by a couple of software engineers as a joke. The name is a nod to the “doge” meme that became popular a decade ago. His pet Shiba Inu imitates that meme: a dog surrounded by a bunch of Comic Sans text in broken English.