Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has recently been accused of owning Dogecoin (DOGE) wallets, fueling his ongoing class action lawsuit for market manipulation and securities fraud in relation to the meme coin. As the founder and CEO of Tesla and briefly, Twitter’s CEO, Musk is currently confronted with a staggering $258 billion lawsuit, alleging his involvement in a Dogecoin pyramid scheme.
The court filing submitted on June 7, 2023, accuses Musk of selling 1.4 billion Dogecoin, valued over $124 million, supposedly through two different wallets owned by the billionaire. This alleged sale took place during a brief window in April (4-6) when Twitter replaced its iconic bluebird image with the logo of Dogecoin – a Shiba Inu dog. Interestingly, price aggregator CoinGecko highlighted a decline in the token’s price during the same period, from $0.095 to $0.085.
In response to these allegations, Musk’s attorney, Alex Shapiro, provided a letter to The New York Post refuting the claims. It stated that the lawsuit accuses Musk of owning the wallets solely based on the timing of the sales, which happened to coincide with an increase in the token’s price.
Late May saw a group of DOGE investors amending the lawsuit, accusing Musk of manipulative practices that inflated the token’s value. The filing claims that the billionaire engaged in “transparent cryptocurrency market manipulation” by using his extensive Twitter following and subsequent appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live to impact the markets.
Despite the increasing legal battles, Musk, self-dubbed as “Dogefather” and “Dogecoin CEO,” continues to openly express his fondness for the meme cryptocurrency. His frequent social media tweets and endorsement of DOGE have led to these recent legal encounters.
Created in 2013 as a joke for the cryptocurrency community to not take itself too seriously, Dogecoin has since soared in popularity and price, now ranking as the ninth largest token by market capitalization on CoinGecko. Currently trading at $0.06, the meme coin has an astonishing market cap of $8.7 billion.
Ultimately, the question remains: is Elon Musk Dogecoin’s enigmatic whale, or simply an influential Twitter troll? This daunting decision lies in the hands of the court.
Source: Decrypt
