Elon Musk reacts to Dogecoin creator’s claim about his coding skills

Elon Musk has once again shown his not-so-good side by sparring with Jackson Palmer, one of the creators of the cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, Business Insider reported. In his tirade on Twitter, Musk even went on to say that his kids "wrote better code when they were 12" than what Jackson had sent to him back in 2018. 

For the uninitiated, Jackson Palmer is a software engineer at Adobe, but he is popular as one of the creators of the meme cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. About a decade ago, Palmer was joking about the speculation in cryptocurrencies and suggested that a dog coin be created. He even bought the domain name dogecoin.com, after the former IBM engineer Bill Markus got in touch with him. 

The duo, who had never met before, set about writing a program for the meme cryptocurrency and launched it in December 2013. Fast forward to the present day, Dogecoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies and has found a fan in none other than Elon Musk, the world's richest person. Musk has often tweeted about Dogecoin, and his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, accept this meme coin as a valid payment option for their merchandise. 

What is Elon Musk angry about? 

Musk's anger stems from the comments Palmer made to an Australian news site, Crikey. While speaking about the ills of cryptocurrency, Palmer mentioned that he had written a script for a bot that could pick up crypto scams on Twitter and shared it with influencers like Elon Musk and Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey. 

During the exchange about this bot, Palmer also revealed that he realized that Musk didn't quite understand coding as he projects and even asked Palmer, "How do I run this Python script?", Crikey said in its report. 

Palmer called Musk a "grifter" and said that the latter is simply good at pretending that he knows. He also cited the example of Tesla's full self-driving promise, a vision that Musk has been promoting in the hope that he will deliver it someday. 

What happened next? 

When Crikey published the interview on their Twitter handle, they did not tag Musk. However, a day later, the Tesla CEO swooped down on the post and attacked Palmer by saying that his script was lame and challenged him to share it with the world. 

Palmer complied and shared the link to the short snippet of code he had already posted to the public repository, GitHub, four years ago. Then, Musk tweeted.

My kids wrote better code when they were 12 than the nonsense script Jackson sent me.

Like I said, if it’s so great, he should share it with the world and make everyone’s experience with Twitter better. If he does, you will see what I mean.

Jackson Palmer is a tool.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2022

In another tweet, Musk also said that Palmer forgot to mention that he hasn't written the code for Dogecoin, something that co-creator of the currency, Bill Markus agreed with. 

the people after us did exponentially more than either jackson or i did on the code base

i think i wrote like 20 lines of code and copied the rest ?

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) May 31, 2022

Both Markus and Palmer have moved away from Dogecoin and are no longer involved in the project. While Markus has followed the path of non-fungible tokens, Palmer has been warning the world about the ills of cryptocurrency while continuing to work at Adobe.