A lawsuit accusing Elon Musk of rigging dogecoin is ending.

Investors in the cryptocurrency who said the world’s richest person and his electric car company Tesla committed fraud and insider trading are withdrawing their appeal from an Aug. 29 dismissal of their case.

They are also withdrawing a bid to sanction Musk’s lawyers for allegedly interfering with the appeal, including by demanding payment of their hefty legal fees.

Musk and Tesla, meanwhile, withdrew their motion to sanction the investors’ lawyer for allegedly pursuing a “frivolous” case with ever-changing legal theories to “extort a quick handout.”

A stipulation dismissing the appeal and both sides’ motions was filed on Thursday night in federal court in Manhattan. It requires approval by US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein.

Lawyers for the investors and Musk did not immediately respond on Friday to requests for comment.

Investors accused Musk of using Twitter posts, an appearance on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and other stunts to trade dogecoin at their expense, including by timing trades to Musk’s public statements and activities.

In the Aug. 29 dismissal, Hellerstein said reasonable investors could not prove securities fraud from relying on Musk’s tweets, including that dogecoin was the future currency of Earth and could be flown to the moon by his company SpaceX.

The judge also said he did not understand the investors’ related market manipulation and insider trading claims.

Investors originally sought $258 billion, and amended their complaint four times in two years.

Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it X.

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump picked Musk and biotechnology company founder Vivek Ramaswany to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym echoes dogecoin’s name.

The case is Gorog et al v. Musk et al, US District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-05037.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A representation of cryptocurrency Dogecoin
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the $23-billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency beloved by Elon Musk died on Friday, her owner said.

“She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her,” Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking the fans of her shiba inu called Kabosu — the face of the “Doge” meme.

“I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner,” Sato wrote.

As a rescue dog, Kabosu’s real birthday was unknown but Sato estimated her age at 18, past the average lifespan for a shiba inu, with her birthday celebrated in November.

In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Sato took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa.

She posted that image — with the fluffy shiba inu giving the camera a beguiling look — on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office e-mail chains.

The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu “doge” — pronounced like pizza “dough” but with a “j” at the end.

The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for $4 million and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of $23 billion.

‘Unbelievable’ events

Dogecoin has been backed by hip-hop star Snoop Dogg, “Shark Tank” entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Kiss bassist Gene Simmons.

But its most keen supporter is probably the billionaire Musk, who jokes about the currency on X — sending its value soaring — and hails it as “the people’s crypto”.

Dogecoin has also inspired a plethora of other cheap and highly volatile “memecoins”, including spin-off Shiba Inu and others based on dogs, cats or Donald Trump.

Kabosu fell ill with leukaemia and liver disease in late 2022, and Sato said in a recent interview with AFP in her home of Sakura, east of Tokyo, that the “invisible power” of prayers from fans worldwide helped her pull through.

The 62-year-old Sato said she had become so used to “unbelievable” events that, when Tesla boss Musk changed the icon for Twitter, now X, to Kabosu’s face last year, she “wasn’t even that surprised”.

“In the last few years I’ve been able to connect the online version of Kabosu, all these unexpected things seen from a distance, with our real lives,” she told AFP.

A $100,000 statue of Kabosu and her sofa crowdfunded by Own The Doge, a crypto organisation dedicated to the meme, was unveiled in a park in Sakura in November last year.

Sato and Own The Doge have also donated large sums to international charities, including more than $1 million to Save the Children. The NGO says it is “the single largest crypto contribution” it has ever received.

“The Doge is the most popular dog of the modern era,” said Tridog, a pseudonymous member of Own The Doge, describing Kabosu as “the Mona Lisa of the internet”.