Elon Musk Accused Of Insider Trading, Amended Lawsuit Blames His Bullish DOGE Moves

Tech billionaire and self-proclaimed "Dogefather" Elon Musk has been accused of insider trading in the third amendment of an ongoing $258 billion lawsuit by Dogecoin investors. The suit alleges Musk's bullish moves manipulated the price of the meme coin, which cost them billions of dollars.

A new set of facts and evidence involving Musk's cryptocurrency training and promotional activities were submitted to the court in an amended legal case Wednesday. The latest court filing included a new piece of evidence of the tech billionaire's alleged market manipulation

According to the plaintiffs, Musk briefly replaced the Twitter logo with the face of a Shiba Inu dog, which is the mascot of Dogecoin, the world's first-ever meme coin. The move aligned with the surge in the price of Dogecoin, which at that time skyrocketed to as high as 30% and dropped as soon as the original Twitter logo was restored.

Aside from that, the latest court filing claimed that Musk was responsible for the "Dogecoin enterprise as a whole" and argued that the meme coin is a security under the Exchange Act.

The amendment centered on the "deliberate course of carnival barking, market manipulation and insider trading" allegedly devised by Musk to artificially boost the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% and then let it crash, to short the value of the crypto asset

Moreover, the plaintiffs alleged that Musk also manipulated the Bitcoin market when his electric vehicle company, Tesla, purchased and sold BTC in 2021.

Previously, the plaintiffs alleged Musk used his posts on Twitter, paid influencers and used his appearance on "Saturday Night Live" in 2021 to amp up the value of DOGE.

In March, Tesla and Musk filed a motion to dismiss the second amended complaint and labeled it a "fanciful work of fiction" while calling another amendment, filed on May 26, as "unjustified."

Musk's legal team declined to make a comment on the latest issue, according to New York Post.

The third amendment on the $258 billion lawsuit against the tech billionaire appeared to have not impacted the investors' sentiment toward DOGE.

The world's first-ever meme coin saw a 0.96% gain and was trading in the green zone at $0.07203 over the past 24 hours, with a 24-volume of $157,106,981 as of 1:13 a.m. ET on Friday, data from CoinMarketCap showed.