Elon Musk’s ‘Baby Shark’ tweet boosts publisher’s share price by 10%

More than 8bn people have now watched the tune on YouTube

Graeme Massie
Los Angeles
Wednesday 02 June 2021 13:16 EDT
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Elon Musk boosted the share price of Samsung Publishing by more than 10 per cent after he tweeted about their viral Baby Shark children’s song.

The South Korean company is a major shareholder in SmartStudy, which produced the song that has become the most popular video on YouTube with more than 8bn views.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who has a one-year-old son called X AE A-XII with singer Grimes, took to Twitter to praise the tune on Wednesday.

“Baby Shark crushes all! More views than humans,” he tweeted along with a video of the song in response to a tweet by the official South Park account.

That was enough to boost Samsung Publishing, which is not linked to multi-national giant Samsung Group, in Asian trading on Wednesday, with the price finally ending up six per cent.

The runaway success of Baby Shark has seen the company’s stock price quadruple since the end of 2018.

This is far from the first time that the billionaire entrepreneur’s social media postings have influenced markets.

In the past few months his tweets about Bitcoin and Dogecoin have both boosted and sunk prices in the cryptocurrencies.

Last month Mr Musk tweeted that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment for its electric vehicles because of concerns about the environmental impact of mining operations.

The tweet contributed to a crash in cryptocurrency prices that saw an estimated $1.3 trillion in market value wiped out.

Also on Wednesday Mr Musk posted a picture of the Dogecoin Shiba Inu dog at a computer with the caption, “Found this pic of me as a child”.

That tweet alone was enough to see the price of Dogecoin increase by 21 per cent to $0.39.

The video for Baby Shark was created by SmartStudy’s Pinkfong division, which it says “develops creative, animated content to provide stimulating and fun learning experiences to children worldwide.”

Pinkfong content is distributed through mobile apps and online platforms like YouTube and Amazon Video.

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