The $258 billion racketeering lawsuit against Elon Musk has grown, with seven new investor plaintiffs and six new defendants, one of which is Musk’s tunnel construction company, Boring Co.
On Tuesday night, a new complaint was filed in federal court in Manhattan. It says that Musk, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc., SpaceX, Boring, and others boosted the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% over the course of two years before letting it drop.
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The complaint says that the defendants “made tens of billions of dollars” at the expense of other Dogecoin investors, even though they knew that Dogecoin had no “intrinsic value” and that its value “depended only on marketing.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring had yet to reply to requests for comment. During 2020, Tesla’s public relations team was eliminated.
It was in June when the initial lawsuit was submitted.
Musk is said to have said in an interview that “those who work around the SpaceX or Tesla plant” asked him to “keep supporting Dogecoin.” Soon after, the world’s richest man tweeted that he would “keep supporting Dogecoin.”
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The Dogecoin Foundation, which describes itself as a nonprofit that helps with Dogecoin governance and assistance, is one of the new defendants. No one from the company could be reached right away for comment.
Damages of $258 billion are three times larger than the expected drop in Dogecoin’s market value since May 2021.
As a fake financial expert on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” Musk called Dogecoin “a scam” during the “Weekend Update” segment.
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On Wednesday, the price of a dogecoin was around 6 cents, down from around 74 cents in May of 2021.
United States v. Johnson et al., Musk et al. The case number is 22-05037 and it was filed in the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
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