Elon Musk has a lot on his plate right now, between his duties as head of Tesla and SpaceX and, of course, Twitter. And in fact, it’s Musk’s tweets that have resulted in yet another misadventure for him, in the form of a $258 billion lawsuit filed by investors in the cryptocurrency “Dogecoin.” The lawsuit accuses Musk of making misleading and fraudulent statements about the token. Musk just filed a request to have the suit thrown out by a judge in Manhattan federal court.
The lawsuit says that Musk intentionally used his social media influence to artificially inflate the value of Dogecoin by 36,000% over the course of two years. It alleges that Musk’s activities generated billions of dollars in profit at the expense of other Dogecoin investors, while he knew that the token had no actual “intrinsic” value. The $258 billion in sought damages reportedly comes from taking Dogecoin’s market decline across a little over a year before the suit was filed, and tripling it.
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Some of Musk’s tweets about Dogecoin include “Dogecoin Rulz” and “no highs, no lows, only Doge,” which Musk’s filing says are too humorous and vague to be considered unlawful:
“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 …This court should put a stop to plaintiffs’ fantasy and dismiss the complaint.”
The nonprofit Dogecoin Foundation is also named in the lawsuit, and is also seeking to have it thrown out.
The lawyer representing the investors suing Musk and co. had this to say in an emailed press statement: “We are more confident than ever that our case will be successful.”
A judge will eventually decide whether the suit will be thrown out or if it can continue.
And in a weird twist that literally no one saw coming, on Monday Elon changed Twitter.com’s logo to the the Dogecoin doggy. No one knows why and it’s likely not related to the lawsuit, but the change did cause the coin’s value to increase a little over 20% as of this writing.