Elon Musk denies such rumors and puts forward his version of who exactly is hiding behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Sahil Gupta, a former employee of SpaceX and Tesla, presented new evidence that Elon Musk is hiding behind the Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. He first expressed this opinion in 2017, citing logical arguments in favor of his hypothesis — the businessman’s resources and will to implement such a project, as well as the linguistic similarity of statements and other indirect factors.
The new evidence is also circumstantial — in a conversation with Sam Teller in 2017, Musk’s then chief of staff, Gupta asked whether the businessman was Satoshi Nakamoto. In response, he received a significant silence and the phrase, “Well, what can I say?”
In a podcast with Lex Fridman, Elon Musk refuted the rumors and expressed his own opinion — according to the billionaire, the Bitcoin creator is a scientist Nick Szabo, a specialist in computer science and cryptography. In 1998, Szabo presented an algorithm for a decentralized digital currency called “Bit Gold,” which is considered to be Bitcoin’s predecessor. However, the project was never put into practice, and Szabo denies his involvement in the work on the first cryptocurrency.
Various experts give arguments in favor of Musk’s version. Thus, the Bitcoin white paper is mainly similar to Nick Szabo’s work in computer science and cryptography in terms of style of presentation and topics. This conclusion was made by linguists from Aston University in Birmingham, who analyzed more than 40 articles from the scientist’s official website. Among other things, the researchers noticed an interesting detail — in Szabo’s articles, there is often a double space, which is also typical for Satoshi’s original article about Bitcoin. Among the most popular versions of the emergence of this pattern is the typing of original texts in the LaTeX editor and their subsequent conversion into PDF format.
