"I hope they do! It would be awesome."

Bring It

Elon Musk says Bring. It. On.

Rumors spread yesterday on social media that the Securities and Exchange Commission was allegedly investigating the Tesla CEO and billionaire for his tweets about alternative cryptocurrency dogecoin.

The rumor was first surfaced by financial news service First Squawk in a Thursday tweet that quickly went viral, but official sources have yet to confirm that Musk is actually being investigated (though it's worth noting that the SEC, like most government agencies, traditionally does not comment on ongoing investigations).

"I Hope They Do!"

Investigation or not, Musk isn't exactly shaking in his boots. "I hope they do! It would be awesome," Musk tweeted in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek tweet.

In other words, he called the internet's bluff. As of right now, there isn't actually any US federal regulator that supervises the trading of cryptocurrency assets, including dogecoin. But that's subject to change with the Biden administration taking over.

Musk's recent tweets, a series of cartoony memes featuring dogecoin's mascot, an adorable shiba inu, sent the cryptocurrency soaring. A single word tweet sent the value shooting up by a whopping 25 percent earlier this week.

It's Complicated

It would be far from Musk's first kerfuffle with the regulator. The billionaire has faced off with the SEC on a number of occasions involving the shares price of his electric car company Tesla.

In a now infamous 2018 tweet, Musk stated that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, a number that later turned out to be an ill-advised weed joke.

The SEC didn't think it was funny and forced him to step down as the car company's board chairman in September 2018.

The fallout between the now richest man in the world and the regulator became apparent almost immediately, with Musk telling CBS News in December that "I do not respect the SEC."

The SEC has yet to publicly comment on the Dogecoin conundrum.

READ MORE: Elon Musk says SEC probe of Dogecoin tweets would be ‘awesome’ [New York Post]

More on dogecoin: Single-Word Elon Musk Tweet Sends Crypto Dogecoin Soaring


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