Tesla chief Elon Musk is guilty of insider trading against his followers using Dogecoin (DOGE), alleged investors in memecoin in a lawsuit against the tech tycoon on Wednesday.
The charges are a follow-up to a $258 billion class action lawsuit filed by the same group in June 2022, accusing Musk and his companies of causing hundreds of billions in losses to Dogecoin holders.
Elon Musk’s Dogecoin Agenda
for every rate filing In Manhattan federal court on May 31, Elon Musk engaged in a “deliberate course of manipulation in the carnival barking market,” through a “propaganda circus” aimed at increasing the price of Dogecoin.
These include his stunts his public appearance And social media activity drove Dogecoin activity dating back to April 2019. These stunts boosted the price of Dogecoin by 36,000% to $0.70 by May 2021. Today, the price of DOGE is down 90% from that high.
“Musk’s claim that promoting Dogecoin was just well-intentioned fun — and not meant to be taken seriously — is not credible,” the filing read, describing the business mogul as an “apex predator,” and his millions of Twitter followers as prey.
The lawsuit noted that several studies have already shown the impact of Elon Musk’s tweets on the price of Dogecoin. Indeed, Musk’s statements that he will start admissions Dogecoin at SpaceX in 2021, and his visiting To Twitter HQ after taking over the company last year, they each contributed to DOGE’s price change.
Musk exerted influence again by changing the Blue Bird logo on Twitter to a picture of a Shiba Inu from the Doge meme for three days, which helped pump The currency rate increased by 30%.
The filing added that Musk and Tesla traded profitably about the billionaire’s “intentional movements”, citing blockchain records as evidence.
Specifically, the lawsuit claims it tracked down a wallet address — DH5ya — that was allegedly owned by Musk, becoming the largest single owner of Dogecoin by February 2021. That wallet then sold millions of dollars of Dogecoin multiple times throughout April 2021.
Stock fraud?
The main part of the lawsuit is the presumption that Dogecoin is an unregistered security under current standards from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk was founded by Dogecoin creators Billy Marcus and Jackson Ballmer in 2013 — but they have been uninvolved in the project’s development for years. Marcus himself often jokes with Elon Musk on Twitter, and both of them often make flirty comments about cryptocurrency via Twitter.
When the original lawsuit was filed last year, Musk’s lawyers said the lawsuit was fictitious. “There is nothing illegal in tweeting words of support, or funny pictures about a legitimate cryptocurrency that still holds a market capitalization of close to $10 billion,” they said.
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