Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company Tesla won the dismissal of a federal lawsuit accusing them of defrauding investors by hyping the cryptocurrency dogecoin and conducting insider trading, causing billions of dollars of losses.
The decision was issued on Thursday night by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan.
Investors accused the world’s richest person of using Twitter posts, a 2021 appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and other publicity stunts to trade profitably at their expense through several dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controlled.
Elon Musk and Tesla were accused of defrauding investors by hyping the cryptocurrency dogecoin. REUTERS
They also said Musk deliberately drove up dogecoin’s price more than 36,000% over two years and then let it crash, with he and Tesla often timing trades to Musk’s public statements and activities concerning dogecoin.
Investors said this included when Musk sold dogecoin in April 2023 after replacing Twitter’s blue bird logo with the dogecoin Shiba Inu dog logo, causing dogecoin’s price to rise 30%.
Hellerstein, however, said Musk’s tweets that dogecoin was the future currency of Earth, and could be used to buy Teslas or literally flown to the moon by his company SpaceX were “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.”
The judge said that meant no reasonable investor could rely on the tweets to pursue a securities fraud claim. He also said it was “not possible to understand” the investors’ market manipulation and insider trading claims.
Hellerstein dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again.
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