Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said on social media he will eat a Happy Meal on TV if McDonald’s accepts the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin ($DOGE) as a payment method, in a move that put pressure on the fast-food giant to embrace the cryptocurrency.
The tweet came shortly after a cryptocurrency market sell-off that saw the space lose around $600 billion in value, with BTC losing around 26% of its value over the last 30 days, and Dogecoin itself losing around 25%.
The sell-off saw McDonald’s teased the cryptocurrency community with a tweet asking people who run crypto Twitter accounts how they are doing after the sell-off. Shortly after McDonald’s’ tweet came out, Musk fired off one of his own, saying he will eat a Happy Meal on TV if the firm accepts the cryptocurrency as a payment method.
Musk’s tweet comes shortly after his company Tesla started accepting DOGE payments on its website, allowing specific products such as its “cyberwhistle,” its “Giga Texas” belt buckle” and its “cyberquad” four-wheeler for kids to be bought with it. These items are all priced in DOGE, ranging from 12,020 coins for the four-wheeler to 300 DOGE for the cyberwhistle.
On Tesla’s Dogecoin support page, the firm notes that customers who send the wrong amount of DOGE to its address may see their orders get canceled, and adds that if an order is overpaid in the cryptocurrency the “overpayment amount will not be refunded to the original form of payment.”
The page also details Tesla “cannot accept payments from multiple wallets for a single order,” and clarifies that once an “order is placed using Dogecoin as the payment method, it can no longer be canceled.”
Tesla briefly accepted bitcoin payments last year after it invested $1.5 billion in the flagship cryptocurrency. The firm dropped BTC as a payment method shortly after over environmental concerns and hasn’t restarted accepting bitcoin since then.
Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus jumped on social media to support Musk’s push for Dogecoin acceptance, tweeting out he would also eat a Happy Meal while watching Musk eat his own Happy Meal if the fast-food giant accepted DOGE.
Other celebrities jumped in on the trend too, pushing McDonald’s to accept the cryptocurrency as a payment method. The firm hasn’t yet responded to Musk on the issue, however.
Dogecoin was created back in 2013 as a joke. The cryptocurrency’s community is well-known for taking on philanthropic projects, which included helping charitable organizations. It made headlines in 2014 after raising more than $25,000 worth of DOGE to let the Jamaican bobsleigh team attend the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
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