By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Elon Musk and his electric vehicle company Tesla (NASDAQ:) 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 U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan.
Investors accused Musk 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.
According to the investors, 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 he replaced the blue bird logo of Twitter, now known as X, with dogecoin’s dog logo, causing dogecoin’s price to rise 30%.
In seeking a dismissal, Musk’s lawyers said the plaintiffs still had no case despite filing five versions of their lawsuit, which originally sought $258 billion, over two years.
The lawyers said there was nothing wrong with Musk’s “innocuous and often silly tweets” about dogecoin, and no proof either that Musk owned two wallets where suspicious trading was conducted, or that he or Tesla ever sold dogecoin.
On “Saturday Night Live,” Musk called dogecoin a “hustle” while playing a fictitious financial expert on a segment of “Weekend Update.”