Infamous internet clown and horrible SNL host Elon Musk and his two large companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are facing a ludicrously large $258 billion lawsuit over…uh…Dogecoin. As I’ve said before, 2022 is just a wild year of headlines.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Musk and his companies are being sued over claims that they are part of a racketeering scheme involving the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. The potentially expensive lawsuit was filed by Keith Johnson, who claims that Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla were all part of a large-scale pyramid scheme designed to control the price of Dogecoin while also convincing people online that the cryptocurrency was a legitimate and sound investment. Johnson filed the lawsuit on June 16 in the Southern District Court of New York in Manhattan.
In court docs, Johnson’s legal team says that Musk and his companies artificially and illegally inflated the price of Dogecoin. In the docs, Johnson also alleges that he was “defrauded out of money” by Musk’s “Dogecoin Crypto Pyramid Scheme.” (That, by the way, was the name of my electro-pop-punk band in high school.)
As reported by Bloomberg, Johnson argues Musk and his companies “falsely and deceptively” claimed that the cryptocurrency named after an internet joke and created in 2013, was a “legitimate investment.” However—and this is a real shocker so you might want to sit down—Johnson claims that Dogecoin actually has “no value at all.”
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Johnson is seeking $86 billion in damages. On top of that, he wants triple damages of $172 billion as well as a legal order from the court blocking Musk from promoting Dogecoin. On top of all that, he is also declaring that under New York and US Federal law, all trading of Dogecoin is actually gambling and should be regulated as such. Add that all up and you reach the astronomical number of $258 billion. For a little context. Disney bought all of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for $4 billion. And at the start of this year, Mircosoft bought Activision for $70 billion.
Kotaku has contacted Tesla and SpaceX about the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, Johnson is seeking class-action status in order to represent other investors who also lost cash trading in Dogecoin since April 2019.
Musk has been in the news recently for his ongoing feud with a video game comedy website on Twitter. And the funniest part of that feud is how badly Musk is losing. Speaking of Twitter, the billionaire 50-year-old is trying to buy the social media site for a whopping $44 billion dollars. He also has a really terrible Elden Ring build.