A lawsuit brought against Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk over allegations of market manipulation was dismissed by a US Judge on Thursday. The plaintiffs accused Musk of manipulating Dogecoin’s price through his comments on the X platform.
Per the court documents, attorneys representing Dogecoin investors said their clients had lost millions of dollars after investing in Dogecoin. The complainants wanted the court to order Musk to pay $258 million in compensation. They claimed they lost funds due to Elon Musk’s “misleading” statements about Dogecoin.
Why Judge Dismissed Lawsuit Against Musk
While delivering his verdict, US Judge Alvin Hellerstein said Musk’s statements were only aspirational, not factual, and therefore, they couldn’t be the basis of the lawsuit. He added that no reasonable investor would buy Dogecoin based only on Musk’s statements.
The lawsuit, filed in July 2022, also accused electric carmaker Tesla of insider trading. However, Judge Hellerstein said the accusations were unclear. He explained that the plaintiff failed to demonstrate how the Tesla team practiced insider trading in the Dogecoin market.
Attorneys for Plaintiffs Vow to Appeal Judge Hellerstein’s Ruling
Meanwhile, attorneys for disgruntled Dogecoin investors have strongly disagreed with Thursday’s court ruling. On Friday morning, they told crypto news outlet Decrypt that they were planning to appeal the verdict at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The lawyers say they won’t let Musk get away with his wrongdoings.
Musk has been a huge fan of Dogecoin, a Shiba Inu-themed meme coin, since 2021. Even when the $258 billion legal battle was ongoing, he kept showing his support for the Dogecoin token. At one point in 2023, when X was branding from Twitter, Musk replaced the platform’s logo with Dogecoin’s profile picture and kept it for three days.
DOGE recorded significant gains during that period, crossing above $0.1 for the first time in nearly five months.
About Dogecoin
Created by software engineers Jackson Plamer and Billy Markus, Dogecoin entered the market in 2013. It was intended to poke fun at the seriousness that surrounded conventional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin. DOGE is currently the ninth-largest crypto by market cap ($14.51 billion). It is trading at $0.1011, according to data from CoinGecko.
