Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Inc. are being targeted in a $258 billion lawsuit over claims they are part of a “racketeering scheme” in backing the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
Failed investor Keith Johnson filed his suit seeking class-action status and hopes to pull in others who feel they were similarly defrauded by the crypto scheme. Johnson claims that Musk’s flogging of the investment amounted to an illegal effort to inflate the price of the cryptocurrency.
In the filing, Johnson describes himself as “an American citizen who was defrauded out of money by defendants’ Dogecoin Crypto Pyramid Scheme.”
“Defendants falsely and deceptively claim that Dogecoin is a legitimate investment when it has no value at all,” Johnson said in his Thursday filing in Manhattan, according to Bloomberg.
Johnson wants $86 billion in damages, plus triple damages of $172 billion, on top of a court order preventing Musk and his companies from engaging in further Dogecoin promotions. He also alleges that investing in Dogecoin should be defined as “gambling” under New York and federal laws.
Dogecoin has cratered this year and was down to a mere five cents per share this week, which is a 67 percent collapse from its high of 74 cents last year.
Johnson v. Musk, 22-cv-05037, was filed on June 16 in the US District Court, Southern District of New York.
It’s just one more shoe dropping in the constant stream of attacks on Musk and his companies that began only after he started to make statements that could be viewed as politically centrist, or libertarian-leaning.
Indeed, Musk has made note of the uptick in attacks, especially coming from the left, since he began displaying his newly red-pilled status.
In May, for instance, he noted that attacks on him “should be viewed through a political lens.”
The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens – this is their standard (despicable) playbook – but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022
He also hilariously joked that the constant attacks have finally given him the option of using the term “Elongate” to describe the left’s constant claims of scandal.
Finally, we get to use Elongate as scandal name. It’s kinda perfect. ? https://t.co/qSNH7lsn72
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022
It seems that Musk delights in sticking his finger in the left’s collective eye. He even voted for a Mexico-born Republican for Congress in Texas this primary cycle.
On Texas’ primary day, Musk was thrilled to note that he voted for his first Republican ever by pulling the lever for Mayra Flores to take the special election for the Lone Star State’s 34th Congressional seat. Flores is now the first Republican to represent that district in decades.
I voted for Mayra Flores – first time I ever voted Republican.
Massive red wave in 2022.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2022
All this and more has made Musk a pariah among the left. The left’s hate for him has gotten so bad that even the lapdog media has begun engaging in fake news to smear him.
In May, The New York Times claimed that Musk was an automatic racist merely because he grew up as a white boy in South Africa. Then the paper stealth-edited the piece when they were called out for the smears.
In another case, Musk bashed biased NBC “reporter” Medhi Hassan in May when Hassan equated Republicans to Nazis and proceeded to smear Musk for supporting them.
Hassan was upset that many Americans dismiss the far-right and the far-left equally. But to Hassan, the far-right is evil, while the far-left is benevolent.
“America’s far left wants to give us free health care and free child care. America’s far right wants to give us white supremacy and no democracy,” Hassan bloviated.
“And this asymmetrical polarization of U.S. politics would be laughable if it weren’t so horrifying. We are living through an unspeakably dangerous moment, the pro-QAnon, pro-neo-Nazi faction of the Republican Party is poised to expand dramatically come the midterms. We’re just two years away from Donald Trump very possibly reseizing executive power,” Hassan continued.
“If that happens, we may look back on this past week as a pivotal moment, when a petulant and not-so-bright billionaire casually bought one of the world’s most influential messaging machines and just handed it to the far right,” he concluded.
Musk refused to let that go unanswered.
“NBC basically saying Republicans are Nazis,” he tweeted on May 2. He then added (but later deleted) the following: “Same org that covered up Hunter Biden laptop story, had Harvey Weinstein story early & killed it & built Matt Lauer his rape office. Lovely people.”
Elon Musk is no standard Republican, and he isn’t a “conservative” in the usual sense of the word. And he has certainly done things that conservatives do not support — including taking billions in federal subsidies to float his various enterprises.
But he has also said and done things that conservatives can appreciate, and that has driven leftists to make him a target of their vicious cancel culture. And it won’t stop until they feel they have destroyed him. Because, to leftists, political opponents aren’t merely misguided but otherwise worthy human beings. They are evil and deserve to be eliminated in every sense of the word. And Elon Musk has learned just how dedicated the left is to that tenet of their faith.
