A group of Dogecoin investors has finally ended their class-action lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk which claimed the Tesla CEO manipulated the price of the memecoin back in 2021.
A fourth amended complaint was originally dismissed on Aug. 29 but both Musk and the investors filed cross-motions and appeals last month, according to Reuters. "A stipulation dismissing the appeal and both sides' motions was filed on Thursday night in federal court in Manhattan and requires approval by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein," the report states.
The case stems from when dogecoin surged to all-time highs in the summer of 2021. With his frequent tweets about both the coin and the meme, dogecoin shot up in price from under $0.10 a share to around $0.70.
"Investors accused Musk of using Twitter posts, an appearance on NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' and other stunts to trade dogecoin at their expense, including by timing trades to Musk's public statements and activities," Reuters reports.
Some of the alleged misleading declarations included Musk tweeting how dogecoin might become the standard for the global financial system and that he might put a "literal" dogecoin in SpaceX and fly it to the moon.
"These statements are aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified. They cannot be the basis of 10b-5 lawsuit and no reasonable investor could rely upon them," Hellerstein wrote in the Aug. 29 dismissal.
The timing is interesting, if not coincidentally, that it happened the same week Musk was named head of President-elect Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, better known as "DOGE." The initiative will aim to drive large-scale structural reform from outside the U.S. government and take an unprecedented "entrepreneurial approach."
Dogecoin traded around $0.36 at publication time, more than doubling in price since Election Day on Nov. 5. As of Nov. 15, DOGE is the sixth-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $53 billion, according to The Block's price page.
Dogecoin was created as a joke in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer. “I’m actually not actively involved in crypto,” Musk said last month. “I make Dogecoin jokes and stuff because I just kind of like Dogecoin. Because it’s got the best sense of humor, and it has dogs and memes, and I love all those things.”
The class-action complaint at one point claimed Musk engaged in insider trading when he allegedly sold $124 million in dogecoin.
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