Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, has been accused of insider trading and manipulating the price of Dogecoin in a proposed class action lawsuit. Investors claim that Musk used his influence on Twitter, TV appearances, and paid online influencers to trade profitably at the expense of other investors. Musk has been very vocal about Dogecoin for years now, often causing spikes in Dogecoin’s price. However, using his massive online influence to pump Doge and then actually profit from it, which is what the lawsuit claims, is another thing.
A Wednesday night filing in Manhattan federal court claims that Musk sold roughly $124 million worth of Dogecoin in April after he replaced Twitter’s logo with Dogecoin’s logo, which led to a 30 percent increase in Dogecoin’s price. According to the filling, Musk went on a “deliberate course of carnival barking, market manipulation and insider trading” in order to defraud investors. In all, the complaint claims Musk had intentionally driven the price of Dogecoin up by over 36,000 percent over several years, and then let it crash.
This is the third amendment of the lawsuit against Musk, originally filed last June. Musk is being sued for a total of $258 in damages. Musk’s lawyers, who have not yet commented on the new amendment, have previously said the lawsuit was a “fanciful work of fiction.”
Dogecoin started as a joke but garnered a devoted following over the years. It’s currently the ninth largest cryptocurrency according to CoinGecko, with a market cap of just over $10 billion.