The $258 billion class action lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of running a pyramid scheme to inflate the price of dogecoin, a meme-based cryptocurrency, has added seven new investor plaintiffs and six new defendants, including The Boring Company, a tunneling startup owned by Musk, according to an amended complaint filed on Sept. 6 in a New York federal court.
Keith Johnson, a dogecoin investor, sued Musk in June, accusing him of intentionally driving up dogecoin’s price by more than 36,000 percent between 2019 and 2021 and then letting it crash, causing huge losses for retail investors while profiting tens of billions of dollars himself.
“Defendants were aware since 2019 that dogecoin had no value yet promoted dogecoin to profit from its trading,” the complaint said. “Musk used his pedestal as World’s Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure and amusement.”
Two of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX, were also named as defendants in the original complaint. The amended suit added The Boring Company as a defendant.
Johnson is seeking a total of $258 billion in damages, representing three times the drop in dogecoin’s market value between May 2021 and the time the suit was filed.
Musk has not directly addressed the suit but after it was filed in June tweeted “I will keep supporting Dogecoin.”
