Elon Musk and his two companies, namely SpaceX and Tesla, were sued for 258 billion US dollars or around Rp. 3,800 trillion by a Dogecoin cryptocurrency investor named Keith Johnson. In his lawsuit, Johnson claimed to have lost a lot of money after investing in Dogecoin. Johnson said Elon Musk had “manipulated” the price of Dogecoin. This lawsuit was filed in court in the city of Manhattan, New York, United States (US) on Thursday (16/6/2022) at local time. In the lawsuit, Johnson, a US citizen who has purchased, owned, and traded Dogecoin since 2019, accused Musk and his two companies of using Dogecoin as a mere “toy”.
Johnson believes that the price of Dogecoin, which has no underlying value and is not secured by any government or private agency in the US, is easy to be manipulated by various promotions or tweets by Musk on Twitter. He also considered Elon Musk to carry out a “pyramid scheme” against Dogecoin via the internet whose trading activities were manipulated by Musk and his company on Twitter. “Dogecoin is simply a scam where they (Musk) manipulate ‘common people’ into buying the cryptocurrency at a higher price,” Johnson wrote in his lawsuit. As the aggrieved party, he asked Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX for compensation of US$86 billion (approximately Rp. 1,300 trillion). This figure has not been added to the total loss he got when he plunged into Dogecoin in 2019. According to Johnson, the losses were worth 172 billion US dollars (approximately Rp 2,500 trillion), bringing the total loss listed in the lawsuit documents to 258 billion US dollars (approximately Rp 3,800 trillion). In addition to asking for compensation, Johnson asked the court to stop the promotional actions carried out by Musk, along with Tesla and SpaceX, against Dogecoin, as compiled by KompasTekno from Forbes, Friday (17/6/2022).
Then, Johnson, who claimed to represent many people who have invested in Dogecoin, also asked that Dogecoin trading be considered a form of gambling, referring to the legislation in force in New York, USA. Neither Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla have yet responded to Johnson’s lawsuit. Dogecoin price and Musk promotion Illustration of Dogecoin price chart for the last three years. View Photos Illustration of Dogecoin price chart for the last three years. (Coindesk) Regarding Dogecoin, the price of the cryptocurrency when referring to Coindesk data on Friday (17/6/2022), is now at 0.06 US dollars or around Rp. 880, down more than 7 percent over the last 24 hours. If you look at the price chart on Coindesk itself, the value of Dogecoin recently seems to have dropped from its highest figure of 0.74 US dollars or around Rp. 10,900 which occurred around May 2021. If you look at the picture above, the price of Dogecoin has tended to decline over the last few months. However, in several moments in the last three years, the price of Dogecoin has often shot up. This increase is said to have been triggered by various things, one of which was Elon Musk’s tweet on Twitter relating to the cryptocurrency in 2019. At that time, Musk was fond of expressing his support for Dogecoin with a series of tweets involving the code “DOGE”. Musk has also said that he received payments with Dogecoin at Tesla’s online store in December 2021, as well as on SpaceX in the future. Of course, these tweets made the price of Dogecoin skyrocket.
Also read: Elon Musk Fires Singapore Tesla Boss In February 2021, he even tweeted support for Dogecoin, by planning to pay people who want to sell their Dogecoin assets for real money. “If the majority of Dogecoin owners sell their assets, then they will have my full support. I will pay them real money if their Dogecoin is sold,” Musk wrote in a tweet.
About The Author
