Dogecoin lawsuit: Elon Musk, Tesla win dismissal – report
Contributor since / Followers
Apu Gomes/Getty Images News
Elon Musk and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that accused them of insider trading and hyping the price of Dogecoin, Bloomberg reported.
The decision was given by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan on Thursday night.
The lawsuit claimed that Musk and his car company Tesla (TSLA) engaged in fraudulent activities by promoting Dogecoin, which allegedly inflated its price into a $258B ‘pyramid scheme’.
The investors accused Musk’s Twitter endorsements, including statements like ‘One word: Doge,’ a 2021 appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and Tesla’s (TSLA) acceptance of Dogecoin for payments led to significant price volatility and losses for them.
The plaintiffs said that Musk deliberately drove Dogecoin’s price more than 36,000% higher over two years and then let it crash, while Tesla (TSLA) and Musk often timed the trades.
US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, however, pointed out that Musk’s tweets were “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified,” and “no reasonable investor could rely upon them,” according to the report.
The court found no evidence to support the claims that Musk or Tesla (TSLA) had manipulated the market or participated in any “pump and dump” scheme with Dogecoin as per investor accusations, leading to the lawsuit’s dismissal.