Elon Musk and Tesla win dismissal of federal lawsuit claiming they rigged Dogecoin

A class action lawsuit in 2022 accusing Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company Tesla of defrauding investors by influencing the value of their cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, and engaging in insider trading, which resulted in losses amounting to billions of dollars, was dismissed.

The federal lawsuit, which claimed Musk's comments had manipulated the Dogecoin (DOGE) market, was dismissed on August 29 by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York.

Investors sued Musk and his company in June 2022, alleging they had been defrauded by their actions surrounding Dogecoin, which included a number of tweets. The dismissed $258 billion lawsuit alleges that the X (formerly known as Twitter) owner Musk used his platform to influence the price of Dogecoin through tweets and public appearances, including on "Saturday Night Live" on NBC.

They added that Musk purposefully increased the price of dogecoin by more than 36,000% over the course of two years and then allowed it to crash, and that he and Tesla frequently timed trades in response to Musk's public statements and activities pertaining to dogecoin.

According to investors, this included the time that Musk sold dogecoin in April 2023 after changing Twitter's blue bird logo to the Shiba Inu dog logo, which resulted in a 30% increase in dogecoin's price. The investors claimed that Musk had made false statements, including that he had agreed to take on the role of CEO of Dogecoin and that he would launch a Dogecoin into space with SpaceX.

Musk's claims on Twitter that dogecoin would be the earth's future currency and that it could be used to purchase Teslas or even be flown to the moon by his company SpaceX were aspirational and puffery, not fact-based and susceptible to being falsified, according to Hellerstein.

Whaleinsider earlier reported that Sato, a kindergarten teacher, adopted a female Shiba Inu dog in 2008 named Kabosu. In the early 2010s, the dog became famous when the teacher posted pictures of Kabosu on her blog. A specific photo of her dog with a curious expression immediately went viral, and this gave birth to the “Doge” meme and dogecoin in 2013. Kabosu, the famous Japanese dog, is behind the Doge meme and the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, Kabosu passed away at the age of 18 on May 24 after a long illness.

As of writing, CoinMarketCap data shows that Dogecoin, the ninth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is up 0.79% over the past 24 hours and is currently trading at around $0.1016.

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