By James Myers, OAN Staff
Friday, August 30, 2024, 10:35 a.m.
A federal judge in New York has ruled that Elon Musk and his company Tesla have won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing them of misleading investors by inflating the price of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, then engaging in insider trading that led to billions of dollars in losses.
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The sentence was handed down Thursday night by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan.
Investors have criticized Tesla's CEO for using Twitter posts to NBC's Saturday Night Live show, He also engaged in “promotional activities” through multiple Dogecoin wallets controlled by him or Tesla, making profitable transactions at his own expense.
The complaint further alleges that Musk and Tesla frequently engaged in transactions consistent with Musk's own public statements and actions regarding Dogecoin, and that Musk deliberately inflated the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% over a two-year period, then caused it to crash.
This includes when Musk sold Dogecoin in April 2023 after replacing Twitter's bluebird logo with Dogecoin's Shiba Inu logo, causing the coin's price to rise 30%, according to investors.
According to Hellerstein, Musk has claimed on Twitter that Dogecoin is the future of the world's currency and that it can be used to buy Teslas and fly to the moon with his company, SpaceX, but this is “aspirational, hyped, untrue and open to falsification.”
Hellerstein elaborated that no reasonable investor could rely on the tweet to make a securities fraud allegation, and said the investors' claims of market manipulation and insider trading were “incomprehensible.”
And because a judge has dismissed the lawsuit, it cannot be refiled. The investors originally sought $258 billion and have amended their complaint four times in two years.
Meanwhile, Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro expressed joy in a statement, calling it “a very good day for Dogecoin.” Musk's lawyers also argued that there is no evidence that Musk had two wallets to conduct suspicious transactions, or that Musk or Tesla sold Dogecoin.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 and later renamed it “X.” His net worth is $239.3 billion, Forbes.
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