Elon Musk hosts SNL and shortly after, Dogecoin prices drops 30%.  Tesla also announces that it will not accept Bitcoin anymore due to environmental concerns, and Amazon suspends a number of Chinese seller accounts due to fraudulent practices.

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Why SNL has lost its mojo, so much so, that even Elon Musk’s appearance can’t help bringing it back.  His performance was OK and according to Nielsen, the show’s ratings were third highest this season, just below the ones hosted by comedians Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle in terms of ratings.

But if the show had a boost in ratings, Dogecoin price went in the opposite direction. Dogecoin’s price dropped from 66 cents to below 55 cents during the show, and fell to 43 cents in the hours following the program. Musk mentioned Dogecoin by making fun of the cryptocurrency, and even his mother, Maye joined the fun. “I’m excited for my Mother’s Day gift. I just hope it’s not Dogecoin.”

Meanwhile, on a more serious (or maybe not) note, Elon Musk also announced on Wednesday that Tesla won’t accept Bitcoin moving forward.  This just 3 months after Tesla announced that it would begin taking Bitcoin as payment.  Why the back pedaling?

“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk said in a statement posted to his Twitter account.   And by the way, it was also three months ago when Tesla also said at the time that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin (which it plans to keep).  Needless to say, that caused the typical overreaction in the Crypto market with most crypto currencies dropping in value around 8-10%.  Haven’t we seen this movie many times before?

Moving on to Amazon news, we know that this year’s Prime Day will be sometime in June.  When?  We don’t know yet.  But sellers are starting to get a little anxious since they need a few weeks to prep and ship their inventory.  But not all sellers will be around for Prime Day 2021.  That’s because Amazon has suspended several top Chinese sellers accounts and their products have all disappeared from Amazon over the past few days.  At least eleven accounts that originate from Greater China were suspended, according to Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.

Among others, Mpower and Aukey were two of the most successful brands native to the American marketplace.  According to Kaziukenas, the total gross merchandise value (GMV) of the suspended accounts was over a billion dollars to Amazon.

Amazon didn’t comment on the status of the suspended accounts, but said in a statement for TechCrunch that it has “long-standing policies to protect the integrity of our store, including product authenticity, genuine reviews and products meeting the expectations of our customers. We take swift action against those that violate them, including suspending or removing selling privileges,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

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