Bitcoin rises 20% after Elon Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio

Bitcoin climbed 20% on Friday after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio.

Virtual currency surged suddenly around 3:30 a.m. ET, adding $ 5,000 in the span of an hour to trade at $ 37,299, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. At 5:17 am ET, it was trading 16% higher at around $ 36,423.

Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio earlier Friday morning. He also sent out an enigmatic tweet, saying: “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”

This adds to the insane market volatility this week, as the stock prices of heavily sold companies like GameStop and AMC have risen significantly thanks to a rush of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit WallStreetBets forum.

Another sub-reddit group, SatoshiStreetBets, has led investors to raise the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by the popular ‘doge’ meme. Dogecoin has risen 800% in the past 24 hours at one point.

This isn’t the first time Musk’s tweeting habits have caused an asset’s price to skyrocket. The entrepreneur recently helped extend an after-hours GameStop share price rally on Tuesday, after tweeting “GameStonk” and linking to the WallStreetBets Reddit community.

Meanwhile, shares of CD Projekt from Poland jumped 12.6% on Thursday after Musk tweeted that he liked the company’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.

Musk’s addition of bitcoin to his Twitter profile follows much speculation that Tesla’s CEO will buy bitcoin or add cryptocurrency to his electric car company’s balance sheet.

The billionaire grabbed the headlines after a Twitter exchange with the CEO of software company MicroStrategy last month, after a tweet suggesting he was tempted to buy bitcoin. Along with Square, Jack Dorsey’s fintech, MicroStrategy used its own balance sheet to buy bitcoin last year.

“If you want to do your $ 100 billion shareholders a favor, convert the $ TSLA balance sheet from USD to #BTC,” MicroStrategy boss Michael Saylor said at the time.

In response, Musk said, “Are such large deals even possible?”

MicroStrategy is hosting an event called “Bitcoin for Business” next week. Asked by Morgan Brenner of CNBC what companies would attend, Saylor simply replied that there would be “thousands of executives, officers, directors and business advisers.”