Elon Musk and Tesla prevail in lawsuit dismissal over alleged Dogecoin market manipulation – One America News Network
OAN Staff James Meyers
10:35 AM – Friday, August 30, 2024
A federal judge in New York has ruled that Elon Musk and his company Tesla has won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that accused them of both defrauding investors by ramping up the cryptocurrency “dogecoin” and conducting insider trading, causing billions of dollars of losses.
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The decision was handed down by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan on Thursday night.
Investors accused the Tesla CEO of utilizing Twitter posts, a 2021 appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live show, and other “publicity stunts” to trade profitability at their expense through several dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controlled.
The lawsuit further stated that Musk and Tesla frequently timed trades to his own public remarks and actions pertaining to dogecoin, and that Musk deliberately drove up the price of dogecoin by more than 36,000% over the course of two years before letting it crash.
Investors also said this included when Musk sold dogecoin in April 2023, after replacing Twitter’s blue bird logo with the dogecoin Shiba Inu dog logo, prompting dogecoin’s price to increase by 30%.
Musk’s claims on Twitter that dogecoin would be the world’s future currency and that it could be used to purchase Teslas or even be flown to the moon by his company SpaceX were, according to Hellerstein, “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.”
Hellerstein elaborated that no reasonable investor could rely on the tweets to pursue a securities fraud claim. He also said it was “not possible to understand” the investors’ market manipulation and insider trading claims.
Additionally, the judge dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again. Investors originally were seeking $258 billion and had amended their complaint four times in two years.
Meanwhile, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, gleefully expressed in a statement that “it’s a very good day for dogecoin.” Musk’s lawyers also maintained that there was no proof that Musk owned two wallets for conducting suspicious trading, or that he or Tesla ever sold dogecoin.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and later rebranded it as “X.” He is worth $239.3 billion, according to Forbes.
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