Elon Musk replaces Twitter’s bird icon with Dogecoin’s cartoon mascot

Twitter’s blue bird icon was replaced yesterday morning with an image of a Shiba Inu, a nod to Dogecoin, the bogus cryptocurrency CEO Elon Musk is being sued over.

The controversial social media boss, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, addressed the change Monday afternoon, tweeting an image of a year-long conversation in which another user suggested Musk “just buy Twitter.” and “to change the bird logo”. a Doge’.

Just two days later, the new joke logo appeared on the site, shortly after Musk asked a judge to dismiss a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support the Dogecoin.

Whether the logo change was serious and permanent or just satire is still unclear.

Lawyers for Musk and Tesla called the lawsuit filed by Dogecoin investors “imaginative fiction” because of the CEO’s “harmless and often silly tweets.”

The lawyers said the investors never explained how Musk intended to defraud anyone or what risks he was hiding, and that his statements, such as “Dogecoin Rulz” and “no ups, no downs, just Doge,” were too vague to name to support fraud claims.

“There is nothing unlawful about tweeting words of support or funny pictures about a legitimate cryptocurrency that continues to have a market cap of nearly $10 billion,” Musk’s attorneys said. “This court should put an end to the plaintiffs’ imagination and dismiss the lawsuit.”

In a footnote, the lawyers also dismissed the investors’ claim that Dogecoin qualified as a security.

Investors’ attorney Evan Spencer said in an email, “We are more confident than ever that our case will be successful.”

Investors accused Musk, the second richest person in the world according to Forbes, of deliberately sending Dogecoin’s price up more than 36,000% over two years and then crashing it.

They said this generated billions of dollars in profit at the expense of other Dogecoin investors, despite Musk knowing the currency had no intrinsic value.

Investors also pointed to Musk’s appearance on a “Weekend Update” segment of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” where he portrayed a fictional financial expert and called Dogecoin “a hustle.”

The $258 billion in damages is three times the estimated decline in Dogecoin’s market value in the 13 months prior to the lawsuit being filed.

The Dogecoin Foundation, a non-profit organization, is also a defendant and is moving to dismiss the lawsuit.

Musk’s posts on Twitter, which he owns, have prompted multiple lawsuits.

He won a court victory on Feb. 3 when a San Francisco jury found him not liable for tweeting in August 2018 that he had arranged the financing to take Tesla private.

The typically volatile Dogecoin has shot up over 20% to around 9 cents in the last 24 hours.

It was trading at just under 8 cents as of Monday morning.

Dogecoin was created in 2013 as a hoax by two software engineers.

The name is a nod to the “dogen” meme that became popular a decade ago.