Dogecoin creator said he thought Elon Musk wanted to 'destroy' Twitter months ago

• Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer said he believes Elon Musk wanted to "destroy" Twitter.
• Palmer made the comments months before Musk decided to back out of the deal.

Dogecoin Co-Creator Jackson Palmer said he knew Elon Musk would back out of his initial Twitter contract months ago.

"The second I heard he was going to make a bid, I thought that he intended to destroy Twitter," Palmer said in an interview with the Australian news outlet Crikey on May 30.

On Friday, July 8, Musk said he's backing out of the $44 billion deal. In a letter, the billionaire's lawyers accused the social media company of making "false and misleading representations" about the number of bots there are on its platform — an issue Musk has been harping on since the deal was signed in April.

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Musk and Palmer did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.

Palmer resurfaced the interview with Crikey on Monday via Twitter in response to a Wired story that said Twitter has fallen into disarray after Musk said he would ditch the deal.

"Musk fucked around with us, fucked with the share price, catalyzed a load of redundancies and cuts," a Twitter employee, who preferred to remain anonymous due to the company's media policy, told Wired. "Morale is so fucking low that nobody wants to be here now anyway."

Insider's Kali Hays previously reported that several Twitter employees were considering jumping ship after Musk initially agreed to buy the social media company.

In his interview, Palmer said he believes it was Musk's plan all along to sabotage Twitter from the inside. The Dogecoin creator's comments came just days after the Tesla CEO said he thinks that about 25% of users on the platform are bots and dissed Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on social media with a poop emoji.

"He was sowing a huge amount of discord and distrust on the platform, and there are huge amounts of churn and attrition from staff," Palmer told Crikey in May. "His play is to either dismantle all trust, or maybe he's delusional enough to think he can build an alternative. The other alternative is that he wants to drive it into the ground at a much lower price, and I think that's what he's doing," he added.

Palmer took several jabs at Musk during the interview, including calling the billionaire a "grifter" who had trouble running basic code. At the time, Musk promptly responded to Palmer's diss by saying the Dogecoin creator "never wrote a line of Dogecoin code" and claiming his kids could write better code.

On Friday, Twitter said it would take Musk to court to force him to buy the company. Experts previously told Insider Musk is likely to face a multi-billion dollar bill and could be forced to buy the company after all.

Since Musk announced he did not intend to honor the deal, Twitter's stock has slid as much as 11% — about 40% below the $54.20 per share price at which Musk agreed to buy the company.