Lawyers representing Elon Musk, the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, are seeking the dismissal of a $258 billion lawsuit filed against him in 2022 by a Dogecoin investor.
Keith Johnson, the investor, accused Musk of engaging in a fraudulent scheme involving Dogecoin and falsely representing the cryptocurrency as legal and valuable.
Johnson demanded monetary compensation from Musk and requested that he cease promoting DOGE.
Musk’s tweets about DOGE have been known to increase the coin’s price, as was the case when he referred to it as “potentially promising” in May 2021.
Musk’s defense team has labeled the lawsuit a bizarre fabrication and argued that his tweets were too vague to constitute fraud.
They described the tweets as harmless and quirky and urged the court to dismiss the case.
In early 2022, Tesla began experimenting with DOGE and Shiba Inu payments and eventually began accepting DOGE as a legitimate payment method.
In September of that year, the company sold a collectible “cyber whistle” for DOGE