A $258 billion lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of running a pyramid scheme to back the Dogecoin cryptocurrency has expanded to seven new investor plaintiffs and six new defendants, including his Boring tunnel construction company, Reuters reported.
According to an amended complaint filed Tuesday night in Manhattan federal court, Musk, his electric car company Tesla, his space tourism company SpaceX, Boring and others intentionally inflated the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% over two years and then allowed it’s a crash, reports news.ro
In this way, the defendants “earned tens of billions of dollars in profits” at the expense of other Dogecoin investors, knowing that the coin has no intrinsic value and that its value “depends solely on marketing,” the complaint states.
Tesla, SpaceX and Boring did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2020, Tesla disbanded its media relations department.
The original lawsuit was filed in June. Shortly after, Musk, the world’s richest man, tweeted that he would “continue to support Dogecoin,” and in an interview he said that “people working around the SpaceX or Tesla factory” had asked for support, according to amended complaint.
Other defendants include the Dogecoin Foundation, which calls itself a non-profit organization that manages and supports Dogecoin. She could not be reached for comment.
The $258 billion loss is three times the expected decline in dogecoin’s market value since May 2021. That’s when Musk, who plays a fictional financial expert on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” called Dogecoin “campaign.”
Dogecoin is currently trading at around 6 cents per unit, down from around 74 cents in May 2021.
Source: Hot News RO
Robert is an experienced journalist who has been covering the automobile industry for over a decade. He has a deep understanding of the latest technologies and trends in the industry and is known for his thorough and in-depth reporting.