Manhattan Judge Alvin Hellerstein has dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) over alleged market manipulation tied to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
In the initial filing, Gorog and other plaintiffs in the class action levelled securities fraud allegations against Musk arising from “a deliberate course of carnival barking market manipulation and insider trading”.
Musk “hijacked an emergent pop-culture phenomenon to cross-promote himself and his companies, and to pad his obscene fortune, preying on the earnest hopes of vulnerable Americans, including war veterans, blue collar workers, and the elderly”, the plaintiffs alleged.
He was accused of using his celebrity status to artificially pump the price of Dogecoin for his personal benefit.
But Judge Hellerstein dismissed Musk’s Tweets as “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified”.
It was "not possible to understand" the market manipulation and insider trading claims made by the class action, said the Judge.
As the self-proclaimed ‘Dogefather’, Musk has a storied history with the Dogecoin memecoin.
In May 2023, he temporarily rebranded Twitter, as his X social media platform was still called at the time, with the Dogecoin logo, sending the coin’s price 30% higher.
The name dropped the coin during a 2021 appearance on Saturday Night Live.
He Tweeted “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool” as far back as 2019.
And finally pic.twitter.com/TcgwMSyjAy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2021
Dogecoin reached a $90 billion market capitalisation in June 2021, a 7,000% increase from the start of the year.
Although Musk consistently Tweeted about the memecoin in the period, the cryptocurrency markets were undergoing a wild speculative rally as a whole.