Back in mid-June, a $258 billion lawsuit was filed against Elon Musk, his electric car manufacturing company Tesla, and his space exploration enterprise SpaceX. Per the filing, the defendants were running a Dogecoin pyramid scheme.
Furthermore, the suit alleged that the defendants drove up the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% over two years and then let it crash. By doing so, the defendants “profited tens of billions of dollars” at other Dogecoin investors’ expense, while knowing all along that the currency lacked intrinsic value and that its value “depended solely on marketing,” the complaint said.
The petitioner, Keith Johnson, sought $86 billion in damages and an additional $172 billion for the losses incurred for trading DOGE from 2019. As reported back then, via the lawsuit, Johnson also represented various other investors who had lost their money in Dogecoin.
Dogecoin Foundation, Boring Co. now under the radar
The lawsuit has now expanded, and several new parties have been dragged into the picture. Per a recently filed amended complaint, seven new investor plaintiffs and six new defendants have been added.
Musk’s tunnel construction business, Boring Co., was one new defendant, while the other was Dogecoin Foundation—the non-profit that supports and governs Dogecoin.
After the complaint was filed in June, Musk did not back off. He had, in fact, tweeted that he will continue supporting Dogecoin.
Now, however, the amended complaint has included this tangent, and his statement made in an interview about how the people working around his companies’ factories had “asked him” for that support. Per Reuters,
Shortly afterward, Musk, the world’s richest person, tweeted that he would “keep supporting Dogecoin,” and in an interview said “people that work around the factory at SpaceX or Tesla” asked him for that support, the amended complaint said.
Furthermore, Reuters brought to light that the $258 billion in damages is triple the estimated decline in Dogecoin’s market value since May 2021. Notably, around that time, Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live, and the hype associated with the same pulled Dogecoin’s price up to a level as high as $0.739.
Since then, the token has not been able to recover. At press time on Thursday, DOGE was trading at merely $0.06, down by almost 92% when compared to the aforementioned level.
