Floki Inu is highly speculative meme crypto based on two tweets by Elon Musk.
In late December 2017, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he wanted to take his company private and had secured the funding for such a move. He also tweeted that “the reason for doing this is all about creating the environment for Tesla to operate best” and cited “extreme public scrutiny” as a major obstacle to success. The tweet was later deleted but it triggered an SEC investigation into whether Mr. Musk violated securities laws in making those claims publicly.
On August 28th, 2018, during another series of tweets about going private again, Elon Musk joked about taking Tesla private at $420 per share (“420” being popularly used as a euphemism for marijuana), citing his “verbal” agreement with the Saudi Arabian government. This tweet was also later deleted and Tesla’s board of directors published their own statement, which said that there had been multiple discussions with the Saudis about taking Tesla private but they were still waiting to see if it would actually happen.
The Floki Inu is based on these two tweets by Elon Musk because dogs are used in many memes (used as animal representation) associated with weed (marijuana) and Twitter has several related dog-related emoticons, including floki_inu: The idea behind this meme crypto is to establish the Floki Inu as a new trading symbol for Tesla shares on OTC or cryptocurrency exchanges. The name Floki Inu is based on the comics, Vikings (Floki) and Japanese Shiba Inus (Inu).
The following chart shows the recent performance of Tesla stock in relation to Elon Musk’s tweets about taking Tesla private at $420 per share (blue circle) and his other tweet about securing funding for such a move by the Saudi Arabian government (purple circle). Note that Tesla did not issue any official news or updates during this time, therefore all references are to comments made by Elon Musk via Twitter.
So how can imaginary crypto which is tied to two simple tweets be worth anything? It turns out there are many similarities between cryptocurrencies and publicly-traded companies.