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Elon Musk, the CEO and product architect of Tesla, has been accused of insider trading in a class-action lawsuit involving the meme coin dogecoin (DOGE). The plaintiffs accuse Musk of inflating the price of DOGE by 30% when he changed Twitter’s blue bird logo “to the Dogecoin Shiba Inu logo.”
Elon Musk Accused of Insider Trading for DOGE Logo Change
On May 31, 2023, a court filing was submitted in Manhattan alleging that Elon Musk engaged in insider trading and manipulated the price of dogecoin (DOGE). The lawsuit against Musk, titled “Johnson et al v. Musk et al,” was initiated last year as a class action in the Southern District of New York. In April of this year, Musk’s legal team attempted to have the case dismissed, with his attorneys arguing that there was no wrongdoing in tweeting about a legitimate currency.
However, investors involved in the class-action lawsuit argue that referring to DOGE as a “legitimate investment” is deceptive since they believe it holds no value whatsoever. In their latest amendment, filed on Wednesday, the plaintiffs discuss how Musk altered the Twitter logo. “The next business day after filing a motion to dismiss in the instant case Musk changed the Twitter blue bird logo to the Dogecoin Shiba Inu logo for three days, spiking the price of Dogecoin 30%,” the recent filing specifies.
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit refer to nearly all of Musk’s actions related to DOGE. Along with highlighting the logo change, the filing also notes that Musk discussed altering the logo on March 26, 2022. After contemplating the idea of altering the Twitter logo in 2022, Musk eventually put his plan into action. The class-action complaint also acknowledges the subsequent tweets made by Musk in relation to the logo change.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers state:
Musk also sent out a Dogecoin promotional tweet in which a police officer is looking at a driver’s license with the blue Twitter bird logo while the driver, a Shiba Inu dog says, ‘(T)hat’s an old photo,’ implying that the Dogecoin symbol was Twitter’s new logo.
The attorneys claim that Musk shared another tweet centered around DOGE on the very same day. They further observe that Twitter reverted back to the blue bird logo on April 6, and insist that it caused dogecoin’s price to experience a sharp decline.
The plaintiffs assert that Musk falsely purports to have altruistic intentions and emphasize in the filing that he has allegedly been advocating for DOGE for a considerable duration. “By June 2022 Musk had already spent more than three years knowingly encouraging the public to invest in dogecoin,” the class-action filing contends.
