Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted about the wildly popular “Baby Shark Dance” video in reply to a post about internet memes.
He remarked that the children’s video has “more views than humans”—a reference to the fact that it has been watched over 8.6 billion times on YouTube, while the human population of Earth is currently estimated at less than 8 billion.
Shortly afterwards, a cryptocurrency token called Baby Shark saw a sharp spike in its price and trading volume.
CoinMarketCap data shows the 24 hour trading volume—a measure of how much of a certain token is traded in a day—of Baby Shark was around $80,000 the night before Musk’s tweet. Early on Wednesday morning, this had increased to over $3 million.
The token’s price spiked too, from around $0.000000005 on June 1 to around $0.000000024 at the time of writing, up roughly 300 percent.
This is likely to change rapidly, however, and cryptocurrencies are notorious for their volatile price swings. Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the risks associated with cryptocurrency investing.
It should be noted that Baby Shark is a new token that appears to have been launched just last month. Its whitepaper—a technical description of how the token works—is four pages long, and the coin is currently only listed on the CoinTiger cryptocurrency exchange.
In addition, there is no information on the token’s website about any of the developers behind the token, which is regarded as a bad sign by investment analysts.
Musk’s influence on the cryptocurrency market is well documented. Last month, the billionaire appeared to once again inadvertently boost the price of an obscure cryptocurrency token—called Starbase—simply by posting a photo of a sign that read the same.
Musk did not elaborate at the time on what the sign meant, but his rocket company SpaceX operates a Texas test site that is sometimes called Starbase.
The entrepreneur is also known for his support of Dogecoin, and last month was widely regarded as one factor behind a sink in the price of Bitcoin after announcing Tesla would no longer accept it as payment.
On Monday, his “Baby Shark” tweet also sparked a surge in the share price of South Korean firm Samsung Publishing, of which entertainment company SmartStudy—the firm behind the “Baby Shark Dance” video—is a subsidiary.