Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is one of the main culprits behind the recent surge of interest in Dogecoin, according to analysts, as he regularly tweets about the cryptocurrency.
But before his appearance on "Saturday Night Live" on NBC on May 8, Musk had a new message for his 53 million Twitter followers.
"Cryptocurrency is promising," Musk wrote Friday, "but please invest with caution!"
Musk also linked a video to an interview he did with TMZ in February in which he expressed the same sentiment.
"People should not invest their life savings in cryptocurrencies, to be clear," Musk told TMZ. "That's unwise."
But, he said, "if you want to speculate and have fun - chances are cryptocurrencies are the future currency of the planet. The question then becomes: which one will it be? Maybe there will be several. But at this point, it's all speculation."
While most do not see cryptocurrency as a future reserve currency, experts agree that those who buy them should only invest what they can afford to lose.
"Because their value does not really correspond to an underlying source of value - like real estate, profits or interest rates - there's almost no way to predict whether they are going to rise or fall at any given time," James Ledbetter, editor of fintech newsletter FIN and CNBC contributor, tells CNBC Make It. "It's pure speculation."
Musk has notably backed Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a joke and depicts a Shiba Inu dog, he told TMZ.
"The point is that dogecoin was invented as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies," he told TMZ. "Dogecoin loves irony. What would be the most ironic outcome? The currency that started as a joke actually becomes the real thing. Let us go to the moon!"
Although all cryptocurrencies are risky and volatile, Ledbetter points out that when you buy Dogecoin, "you risk losing almost all the money you put in," he says. "It has no intrinsic value and its price can crash just as easily as it can continue to rise.
In the past, Musk has limited himself to tweeting memes about Dogecoin. Tesla, on the other hand, has purchased billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and accepts the cryptocurrency as payment for its vehicles.