By Ovunc Kutlu
ISTANBUL (AA) - Billionaire Elon Musk and his electric vehicle firm Tesla were cleared Friday in a $258 billion Dogecoin class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in 2022, alleged that Musk's comments on Twitter, now known as X and owned by Musk, manipulated Dogecoin's price and harmed cryptocurrency investors.
The investors claimed that Musk’s statements, including that Dogecoin might be his favorite currency, the people's crypto, and the future currency of Earth, were misleading.
They also cited claims that Dogecoin might become the standard for the global financial system and the currency of the internet, while Musk put a literal Dogecoin in SpaceX and fly it to the moon and that Dogecoin would pay for the mission, and Tesla vehicles could be bought with Dogecoin, according to the court documents.
"These statements are aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified," US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York wrote in his ruling.
"As for Musk and Tesla's alleged 'pump and dump' scheme, it is not possible to understand the allegations that form the basis of Plaintiffs' conclusion of market manipulation, a 'pump and dump' scheme, a breach of a fiduciary duty amounting to insider trading, or the state law claims," he added.
A number of plaintiffs who joined the class action lawsuit sought $86 billion in damages, in addition to triple damages of $172 billion.
Once an obscure cryptocurrency created as a joke, Dogecoin has quickly become a top-10 crypto asset at the beginning of 2021 as Musk, the world's richest person then, repeatedly posted tweets in favor of it.
It ranked 8th among crypto assets as of Friday with a market cap of $14.7 billion.
Unlike Bitcoin, the world's biggest crypto, Dogecoin does not have any limit on its mining, or the amount that is created.
Despite losing his position in recent years, Musk has once become "the world's richest person" with almost $244 billion net worth as of Friday, according to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List.