Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been slammed with a fresh lawsuit by investors, accusing him of insider trading and manipulating the price of Dogecoin which cost them billions of dollars.
In a filing on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, Southern District of New York, U.S., investors stated that Musk engaged in a deliberate act of manipulation, which saw him pay influencers as well as other publicity stunts, with the intention to pump Dogecoin’s price at their expense.
Musk’s stunts include his public appearances, a reference to his 2021 appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” where he told viewers to invest in Dogecoin, and social media activities hyping the cryptocurrency. These stunts reportedly boosted Dogecoin’s price by 36,000% to $0.70+ in May 2021. Today, DOGE trades 90% down from that high.
Part of the lawsuit filing reads, “Musk’s pretense that promotion of Dogecoin was just well-meaning fun, not meant to be taken seriously is not credible”. A key part of the lawsuit is the presupposition that Dogecoin is an unregistered security under existing standards from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
This amended complaint, which is investors’ third change since the lawsuit started last June, contains a fresh allegation that Musk sold dogecoin worth about $124 million after he switched Twitter’s logo to a Shiba Inu dog in April, that caused the token’s price to surge by 30%.
Specifically, the lawsuit claims to have tracked down a wallet address that allegedly belonged to Musk and became the largest single holder of Dogecoin by February 2021. The wallet is reported to have sold millions of dollars worth of Dogecoin at multiple times throughout April 2021.
These investors accuse Musk of deliberately driving up Dogecoin’s price to more than 36,000% over two years, and eventually letting it crash.
Meanwhile, in response to an earlier iteration of the lawsuit slammed by investors, Musk’s lawyers said his statements were too vague to be considered fraud and called the lawsuit a fantasy. “There is nothing unlawful about tweeting words of support for, or funny pictures about, a legitimate cryptocurrency that continues to hold a market cap of nearly $10 billion,” Musk’s lawyers said at the time,
Recall that Dogecoin according to Musk was created as a joke and has no practical use case. In 2021, Musk said that his social media posts about meme cryptocurrency dogecoin are “just meant to be jokes” and his true allegiance lies elsewhere.
Musk had conceded in the Clubhouse interview that he doesn’t have a strong opinion about tokens outside of Bitcoin, the world’s dominant crypto.
Meanwhile, Investors King understands that the billionaire CEO’s favorite crypto was never clear, but had repeatedly appeared to endorse dogecoin launched in 2013 using the branding of a Shiba Inu dog from a then-popular internet meme to his millions of Twitter followers.
