On Friday, Elon Musk requested a United States judge to dismiss a racketeering lawsuit worth $258 billion, which accuses him of operating a pyramid scheme for supporting the meme token Dogecoin.
As per DogeTribune.com, the filing was made in Manhattan federal court in the evening in which lawyers asked for the lawsuit to be thrown out on behalf of Elon Musk.
The filing
According to the lawyers, the lawsuit, which was filed by Dogecoin investors against the Tesla Inc.’s CEO, is just a work of fiction over the silly and innocuous tweets that the tech billionaire often makes about DOGE.
They further said that the investors had failed to explain the risks that Musk had concealed, or how he had planned on defrauding the investors.
They also added that the tweets in which Musk had spoken in favor of DOGE were too vague and could not support any claim.
Musk’s attorneys said that tweeting funny pictures, or words of support for a genuine cryptocurrency that has a market capitalization of over $10 billion is not categorized as unlawful.
They said that the court should put an end to the fantasy of the plaintiffs and the complaint should be dismissed.
The lawsuit
The investors had claimed in the lawsuit that DOGE classifies as a security and this was rejected by Musk’s lawyers in a footnote.
Evan Spencer, a lawyer for the investors, said in an email that they were confident about succeeding in their case.
According to Forbes, Musk is the second richest person in the world. Investors accused him of driving up the price of the meme token up deliberately by nearly 36,000% over the span of two years and then causing its crash.
The investors stated that Musk was aware that the meme token did not have any intrinsic value and had made profits worth billions of dollars at their expense.
Investors also highlighted the billionaire’s appearance on NBC’s ‘Saturday Night Live’s segment called ‘Weekend Update’.
He had appeared as a fictitious financial expert and the Twitter CEO had referred to DOGE as a ‘hustle’.
More details
13 months before the filing of the lawsuit, there was a massive decline in the market value of DOGE, but the damage figure of $258 billion is triple that amount.
A nonprofit named Dogecoin Foundation has also been named as a defendant in the said lawsuit and it is also seeking its dismissal.
Musk now owns Twitter, but a number of his tweets on the platform have resulted in various lawsuits against him.
On February 3rd, he won a victory in court when he was declared not liable by a jury in San Francisco for a tweet in August 2018.
The billionaire had said in the tweet that he had managed to raise the funds needed for taking Tesla private.