Twitter users are speculating that a new update to the app is an attempt by CEO Elon Musk to bury news of a racketeering lawsuit against him.
The app’s latest update Wednesday features the Doge meme icon prominently on load screens and at the upper left corner of the web version where Twitter’s logo was previously.
Some users thought the move was an April Fool’s Day joke—just two days late.
“Doge for some reason is showing up on Twitter and I can only assume this was supposed to be an April Fools joke that took 3 days to roll out because no one knows how the site works anymore,” wrote a user.
But as others pointed out, Musk is currently embroiled in a lawsuit that accuses him, alone with SpaceX and Tesla, of engaging in a pyramid scheme to support the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, citing his tweets and his vocal advocacy of the coin as proof. Investors said Musk deliberately drove up the price of Dogecoin by more than 36,000% over two years and then let it crash.
Musk’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit last week, calling the suit a “fanciful work of fiction” and his tweets about Dogecoin “innocuous and often silly.”
Dogecoin Foundation, a nonprofit attempting to grow the cryptocurrency, is also a named defendant in the lawsuit and seeks the suit’s dismissal.
Users on Twitter hypothesized that the update could be a move to bury news of the lawsuit. Nearly any move Musk makes on the app spawns a number of news stories, meaning a search for “Doge” and “Musk” would lead them to news about the logo change, and not the lawsuit.
But, to the possible credit of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, as soon as Twitter changed its logo to Doge, Dogecoin went up in value.
Musk, for his part, has not commented on the lawsuit. He has, though, tweeted a meme about the change.
Musk also tweeted a screenshot of an old exchange he had on the platform where someone dared him to change the Twitter logo to Doge.
This is not the first time Musk has found himself in hot water over his use of the app which he now owns.
In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had arranged financing to take Tesla private, leading to an over 6% increase in Tesla’s stock price. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Musk with securities fraud for the tweets, which it called “false and misleading.”
A jury in San Francisco found Musk not liable for the tweets in a lawsuit from Tesla investors, and Musk’s legal team is now seeking the dismissal of the SEC case.
In a more recent case, the SEC is investigating several tweets from Musk as a part of its inquiry into the billionaire’s acquisition of the app.
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*First Published: Apr 3, 2023, 3:55 pm CDT
Jacob Seitz
Jacob Seitz is a freelance journalist originally from Columbus, Ohio, interested in the intersection of culture and politics.
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