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.

Apparently preparing for the upcoming rally, a crypto whale has scooped about $38 million worth of Dogecoin (DOGE) over three days this week to become one of the richest DOGE addresses in the world.

Dogecoin is a dog meme cryptocurrency backed by Tesla owner and Twitter CEO, Elon Musk. 

As of the time of writing this report, Dogecoin is worth $0.087 with a market capitalization of more than $11.5 million, ranking as the 10th largest cryptocurrency. 

Dogecoin is down nearly 5% in the past day but still up more than 5% in the past week. It’s also up roughly 22% since the start of 2023, Binance platform reveals. 

According to BitInfoCharts, the whale now has a balance of more than 709.2 million Dogecoin worth more than $60 million, making it the 20th-largest DOGE wallet in the world. 

Investors King understands that positive social media sentiment has been surrounding dogecoin since Elon Musk posted a picture of a dog as the new Twitter CEO on his Twitter page. Within minutes, the post generated a lot of reactions from crypto enthusiasts. 

Musk tweeted a picture of his pet dog sitting on the company’s CEO’s chair, with the caption: “The new CEO of Twitter is amazing. So much better than that other guy!” he added.

Meanwhile, a Dogecoin wallet that has been inactive for almost two years has recently transferred a significant amount of DOGE to a new address, amounting to 326.4 million DOGE or roughly $28 million at the time of the transfer.

This transfer has caught the attention of the crypto community, with many speculating on the potential impact on DOGE’s price.

However, it is important to note that this is not the first time a large amount of DOGE has been moved around. In fact, earlier this year, a whale transferred 36.8 billion DOGE, which was worth around $1 billion at the time. Despite this large transfer, DOGE’s price remained relatively stable.

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, Dogecoin, a joke coin backed by the billionaire, first rose by 17% on Friday before expanding an additional 70% on Saturday to bring its total gain since the deal was closed to 87%.

The world’s richest man who also doubled as Tesla CEO is named Doge-Father because of his unflinching support for the coin. 

Investors King understands that electric vehicle maker, Tesla is accepting Dogecoin as a means of payment for the company’s merchandise such as tires and other spare parts.

Elon Musk has been a strong advocate of cryptocurrency.

Tesla Inc. held $1.2 billion worth of bitcoin on its balance sheet before the company sold about 75 percent of its holding. 

Similarly, Musk’s newly launched perfume brand “burnt hair” also accepts dogecoin in exchange for the product. 

On several occasions, Musk has tweeted about dogecoin which often led to the surge of the one-time meme coin which now turned out to be one the most favourite digital asset with growing utility.

Dogecoin started as a social media joke before it elicit the interest of the world’s richest man. 

On one occasion, Elon Musk hyped dogecoin by tweeting the word “People’s Crypto”. 

On Saturday, dogecoin extended its weekly gain by more than 70 percent. The coin rallied to $0.134340

The digital asset surged by more than 35 percent on Monday as rumors of Elon Musk completing the acquisition of Twitter traveled wide.

Meanwhile, several sources have confirmed that ChangPeng Zhao, who is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the largest cryptocurrency exchange,  Binance invested a sum of $500 million towards Musk’s buyout of Twitter.

This has raised a strong sentiment that the social media platform will be enormously crypto-friendly going forward. 

Although Twitter in the past years has introduced some cryptocurrency features which include the opportunity to attach bitcoin address to users’ profiles. 

Under the leadership of Twitter’s Co-founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsay, the microblogging platform had started ways to incorporate blockchain technology into the Twitter platform.