Elon Musk accused of deliberately raising the value of the Dogecoin token by 36,000%

Elon Musk is accused of insider trading and deliberate manipulation of the value of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Investors claim that Musk’s jokes cost them millions of dollars.

According to the plaintiffs, one of the richest men in the world deliberately raised the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% in two years and then provoked its collapse. Reuters writes about this with reference to court documents.

The trial against Musk began in June last year. However, on Wednesday, May 31, investors filed new charges against the Tesla CEO and Twitter owner. This is the third amendment to the lawsuit.

The statement filed in Manhattan federal court says that Musk, personally and through his company, controlled several Dogecoin wallets and profited at the expense of other investors by manipulating the value of DOGE.

«Intentional jokes, market manipulation, and insider trading helped Musk defraud investors while promoting himself and his companies ,» the statement said. The plaintiffs claim that for these purposes, Musk paid influencers, exploited his own large Twitter audience, and even appeared on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in 2021.

According to the plaintiffs, when Elon Musk replaced the Twitter logo with the Dogecoin logo in April 2023, he provoked a 30% jump in DOGE. Then Musk took advantage of the price increase and sold his own DOGE tokens for about $ 124 million. After that, investors wanted to include the social network in the list of defendants in the case. But so far, this has not happened.

As for Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency is currently ranked 9th among the top 100 tokens in terms of market capitalization. At the time of publication, the coin was trading at $ 0.072, 90% below its historical high of $ 0.7376 in May 2021.