UNITED STATES: On Friday, Elon Musk requested that a U.S. judge dismissed a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit that accused him of operating a pyramid scheme to back the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. In a filing made in Manhattan federal court in the evening, lawyers for Musk and his electric car company Tesla Inc. called the lawsuit by Dogecoin investors over Musk’s “innocent and often silly tweets” about Dogecoin a “fanciful work of fiction.”
The attorneys said that the investors never described how Tesla’s owner intended to defraud anyone or the risks he hid and that his statements like “Dogecoin Rulz” and “no highs, no lows, only Doge” were too ambiguous to serve as evidence of fraud.
“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,” said Musk’s lawyer, adding that “This court should put a stop to plaintiffs’ fantasies and dismiss the complaint.”
In a footnote, the attorneys denied the investors’ assertion that Dogecoin met the criteria for being an asset.
In an email, the investors’ lawyer, Evan Spencer, said, “We’re more sure than ever that our case will be successful.”
Investors charged Musk, the second-richest person in the world according to Forbes, with purposefully inflating Dogecoin’s price by more than 36,000% over two years before allowing it to crash.
They said that this generated billions of dollars in profit at the expense of other Dogecoin investors, even though Musk knew that the currency had no intrinsic worth.
Investors also cited Musk’s appearance on an episode of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” during which, while taking the role of a fictitious financial expert, he labelled Dogecoin “a hustle.”
The $258 billion damages figure is more than triple the estimated drop in Dogecoin’s market value during the 13 months before the lawsuit was filed. A nonprofit organisation, the Dogecoin Foundation, is also a defendant and is seeking the dismissal of the lawsuit.
Multiple lawsuits have been sparked by Musk’s tweets on the platform Twitter, which he owns. On February 3, a San Francisco jury found him not accountable for tweeting in August 2018 that he had secured financing to take Tesla private, giving him a legal win.
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