♖ Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX Hit With $258 Billion Dogecoin Lawsuit
The lawsuit aims to represent a class of people who’ve lost money trading Dogecoin
The lawsuit aims to represent a class of people who’ve lost money trading Dogecoin
Keith Johnson, “an American citizen who was defrauded out of money by defendants’ Dogecoin Crypto Pyramid Scheme,” sued Musk and his companies, claiming they constitute an illegal racketeering enterprise to inflate Dogecoin’s price.
The lawsuit alleges that Musk was part of a racketeering scheme to back the cryptocurrency.
“Defendants falsely and deceptively claim that Dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has no value at all,” Keith Johnson, who filed the lawsuit, said in the complaint. Johnson is seeking class-action status for the suit and aims to represent other allegedly harmed investors.
Dogecoin was originally designed in 2013 as a joke and to poke fun at Bitcoin. But it went from being an obscure “meme coin” to arguably the most talked-about digital asset in the space during 2020 and 2021.
This is mainly because Tesla CEO Musk would post memes about it on Twitter and, in turn, pump its price. It’s now the 11th biggest digital asset, with a market cap of $7.5 billion. At one point, that figure was as high as $88 billion—bigger than the market cap of many companies on the S&P 500.
But according to Bloomberg’s report, Johnson wants to represent people who lost money trading the asset. He is asking for $86 billion in damages, along with triple damages of $172 billion.
On top of all that, he is also declaring that under New York and US Federal law, all trading of Dogecoin is actually gambling and should be regulated as such. Add that all up and you reach the astronomical number of $258 billion
