Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, responded to Dogecoin co-founder Jackson Palmer on Twitter after he labeled him a grifter.
Palmer, the co-creator of popular memecoin Dogecoin, shared in an interview with Australian news site Crikey that he reached out to Musk on Twitter years earlier to talk about a bot he developed that could identify crypto scams on Twitter. Palmer shares that their interaction made him think Musk “didn’t understand coding as well as he made out.” Palmer also said Musk had no idea how to run the Python script.
“He sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that,” explained Palmer. “He’s just really good at pretending he knows. That’s very evident with the Tesla full-self-driving promise.”
The Tesla CEO took to Twitter to let people know his thoughts regarding Palmer’s comments. “My kids write better code when they were 12 than the nonsense script Jackson sent me,” he said. “If it’s so great, he should share it with the world and make everyone’s experience with Twitter better.”
Palmer had no problem sharing the code, which he posted on GitHub four years earlier.
“I never said it was super complex, but this simple script definitely worked in catching and reporting the less sophisticated phishing accounts circa 2018,” Palmer tweeted. “They’ve since evolved their tactics. I shared it with a lot of people, and it worked for them.”
Elon Musk also questioned Palmer’s contribution to DogeCoin as Musk has consistently shown support for the cryptocurrency, helping it generate more value. He also arranged for Tesla and SpaceX to take Dogecoin as payment.“Palmer always forgets to mention that he never wrote a single line of Dogecoin code,” Musk tweeted.
Jackson Palmer reached out to fellow co-creator Billy Markus to respond to Musk’s comments in a tweet that has been deleted. The two initially created Dogecoin as a joke in 2013, but neither of them have worked on the cryptocurrency for some time now.
“The people after us did exponentially more than either Jackson or I did on the code base,” Markus tweeted. “I think I wrote like 20 lines of code and copied the rest.”
