Elon Musk, Tesla Want $258 Billion Dogecoin Case Dismissed
April 2, 2023Elon Musk’s legal team has asked a federal court in Manhattan to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit brought against him by Dogecoin investors, the news of which ZyCrypto broke in June 2022.
The lawsuit, broadly speaking, accuses the one-time world’s richest man of partaking in a racketeering scheme to pump the price of canine-themed cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Musk Moves To Dismiss Dogecoin Lawsuit
Elon Musk is attempting to throw out a class-action lawsuit against him, seeking an astonishing $258 billion in damages.
Musk’s lawyers indicated in a court filing that the lawsuit against the billionaire by Dogecoin investors was simply a “fanciful work of fiction”. They explained that Musk’s DOGE evangelism on social media, including his tweets saying “no highs, no lows, only Doge” and “Dogecoin Rulz”, were too vague to justify a fraud allegation.
Musk’s legal team described the eccentric CEO’s tweets as “innocuous and often silly” in a bid to convince the court to dismiss the case. “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,” they continued.
Musk is accused of falsely claiming that Dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has zero value. He also allegedly inflated the coin’s price by more than 36,000% in the span of two years before letting it fall back to earth.
The Twitter CEO’s tweets are typically a major driver behind Dogecoin’s price action. The meme coin hit its all-time high around the time Musk dedicated an entire sketch to it on Saturday Night Live. In the lawsuit, the investors noted that Musk portrayed himself as a fictitious financial pundit on SNL and called DOGE “a hustle”.
Dogecoin, despite being based on a Shiba Inu dog, may have some uses: Musk announced in January 2022 that his EV maker Tesla would accept Dogecoin as payment for the company’s merch. Later in May of that year, he announced that DOGE payments would also be accepted by his space exploration company SpaceX. And Musk has indicated previously that he is working with developers to make the world’s-largest joke coin a bitcoin rival.
According to reports, lawyers representing the plaintiff in the multi-billion-dollar Dogecoin lawsuit are “more confident than ever that our case will be successful.“
DOGE was most recently trading at slightly over 8 cents, a gain of over 6.4% in the last 24 hours.
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