A group of
investors in a class action suit have accused Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, of
adopting several manipulative techniques to influence the price of Dogecoin order to trade with profit at their expense, Reuters reported on Thursday. They alleged that Musk
deliberately shot up the price of memecoin by over 36,000% over two years and then let
it crash, costing them billions of dollars in losses.
Reuters
reports that the allegations are contained in a court document filed on
Wednesday night before a federal court in Manhattan. The Dogecoin investors
requested leave to include the allegations in a third amendment to the class
action lawsuit that began in June last year.
According
to the group, the Twitter owner engaged in profitable trading at their expense
using several Dogecoin wallets controlled by Tesla or him. He also allegedly
paid online influencers and used his Twitter followership to influence the coin.
In
addition, the investors are alleging that Musk used his appearance on NBC’s
‘Saturday Night Live’ in 2021 and other publicity tactics to influence the
price of the digital asset.
Musk and Dogecoin
Dogecoin
was created in 2013 by two software engineers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus as a parody of
popular internet meme ‘doge’, which is based on the Shiba Inu dog. The cryptocurrency uses the
same proof-of-work technology as Litecoin.
Musk,
currently the world’s richest person after Bernard Arnault, is a well-known
supporter of the memecoin. In the past, he often tweeted about the coin and
even suggested in 2021 that his electric car company Tesla will accept dogecoin
as payment on a test basis.
In April
this year, Musk even briefly replaced Twitter’s blue bird logo with dogecoin’s Shiba
Inu logo for a few days, sending the price of the cryptocurrency higher. In the proposed amendment to the lawsuit, the investors claim that Musk sold about $124 million of Dogecoin after
the action, causing a 30% jump in the memecoin’s price.
Musk, known
to regularly engage with his followers on Twitter, a social messaging
platform he acquired last year, is yet to comment on the report.
A group of
investors in a class action suit have accused Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, of
adopting several manipulative techniques to influence the price of Dogecoin order to trade with profit at their expense, Reuters reported on Thursday. They alleged that Musk
deliberately shot up the price of memecoin by over 36,000% over two years and then let
it…
