The Dogecoin-related lawsuit against Tesla CEO Elon Musk has grown in size. The lawsuit is accusing Musk of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency.
Seven new investor claimants and six new defendants were added to the lawsuit, including his tunnel construction company Boring Co.
Keith Johnson, a Dogecoin investor, filed a US$258 billion class action lawsuit against Musk, accusing him of running a pyramid scheme by advocating Dogecoin. Johnson also named Tesla and SpaceX in the original draft of his lawsuit.
Musk, his electric car company Tesla Inc., his space tourism company SpaceX, Boring and others, according to an updated Dogecoin Foundation petition, have intentionally raised the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% in two years and then let it crash.
In doing so, he made a fortune of billions of dollars to the detriment of other Dogecoin investors, knowing that the currency had no intrinsic value and that its value, according to the complaint, was entirely dependent on marketing. Musk is accused of using his social media profile to promote Dogecoin as a legitimate investment in order to artificially boost his valuation.
The US$258 billion in damages the lawsuit seeks is three times the estimated decline in Dogecoin’s market value since May 2021.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.