Elon Musk’s new problem: they sue him for promoting an alleged scam with dogecoin

All the publicity and trust placed by Elon Musk on the cryptocurrency-meme dogecoin, could now be very expensive. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and candidate for the purchase of Twitter, has received a lawsuit worth 258,000 million dollars on the accusation that he allegedly directed a pyramid scheme to promote the cryptocurrency whose emblem is a dog.

The digital asset, launched as a joke in 2013, was originally designed to poke fun at Bitcoin, but Musk’s words and the push it received from various internet forums has seen it trade at times .

Specifically, the cryptocurrency – also known as DOGE – hit the headlines after surging dramatically last year.

In just over four months, dogecoin went from $0.004 to $0.73, a gain of over 18,000%.

Musk regularly tweeted about DOGE during this period, and on the day the coin began to drop, he described it as a “scam” on the American comedy show Saturday Night Live.

Dogecoin has fallen dramatically in the last year – and at the time of this writing, it is down 92% from the all-time high seen last May.

Following these swings, Musk, the world’s richest man, is accused of “promoting Dogecoin to profit from its trade.”

Tesla allows you to pay with dogecoin in its online store

The lawsuit filed in a New York court states, according to Bloomberg, that “Musk used his speaker as the richest man in the world to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin pyramid scheme for profit, exposure and fun.”

The lawsuit has been prompted by an American man named Keith Johnson, who alleges he was “defrauded of money” as a result of the businessman’s comments.

The plaintiff’s lawyers must claim that cryptocurrency “has no value,” and court documents quote billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have questioned the value of these digital assets.

Beyond his demands for $258 billion in damages, he also wants Musk, Tesla and SpaceX banned from promoting DOGE.

Earlier this year, Tesla began accepting Dogecoin as a payment method for its merchandising products, but not for its cars.