NEW YORK, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Elon Musk and his electric

vehicle company Tesla won the dismissal of a federal

lawsuit accusing them of defrauding investors by hyping the

cryptocurrency dogecoin and conducting insider trading, causing

billions of dollars of losses.

The decision was issued on Thursday night by U.S. District

Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan.

Investors accused Musk of using Twitter posts, a 2021

appearance on NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and other publicity

stunts to trade profitably at their expense through several

dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controlled.

According to the investors, Musk deliberately drove up

dogecoin's price more than 36,000% over two years and then let

it crash, with he and Tesla often timing trades to Musk's public

statements and activities concerning dogecoin.

Investors said this included when Musk sold dogecoin in

April 2023 after he replaced the blue bird logo of Twitter, now

known as X, with dogecoin's Shiba Inu dog logo, causing

dogecoin's price to rise 30%.

In seeking a dismissal, Musk's lawyers said the plaintiffs

still had no case despite filing five versions of their lawsuit,

which originally sought $258 billion, over two years.

The lawyers said there was nothing wrong with Musk's

"innocuous and often silly tweets" about dogecoin, and no proof

either that Musk owned two wallets where suspicious trading was

conducted, or that he or Tesla ever sold dogecoin.

On "Saturday Night Live," Musk called dogecoin a "hustle"

while playing a fictitious financial expert on a segment of

"Weekend Update."

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)