Elon Musk ripped intoJackson Palmer over claims the billionaire struggled with computer programming.- The
dogecoin cocreator made comments critical of Musk to an Australiannews outlet.
Elon Musk criticize Jackson Palmer, a dogecoin cocreator, on
In an interview with the Australian news site Crikey, Palmer said he messaged Musk on Twitter several years ago after creating a bot that could help identify crypto scams on Twitter. During the exchange, he said it became clear that Musk "didn't understand coding as well as he made out." Palmer said Musk didn't know 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," Palmer said. "He's just really good at pretending he knows. That's very evident with the
Musk responded to the article on Twitter with some harsh comments of his own.
"My kids write better code when they were 12 than the nonsense script Jackson sent me," Musk tweeted on Tuesday about Palmer's code from 2018. "If it's so great, he should share it with the world and make everyone's experience with Twitter better."
Palmer took the opportunity to share the code, which he posted on GitHub four years ago. He did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
"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 said on Twitter. "They've since evolved their tactics. I shared it with a lot of people, and it worked for them."
Palmer, who parted ways with dogecoin in 2015, citing a "toxic" culture, said in a Twitter thread that Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder, had told him in 2018 that the social-media network was trying to run a similar script. Palmer added that the code wouldn't be as effective today, as scammer tactics had become increasingly sophisticated.
Musk, who is in the process of purchasing Twitter, didn't stop there. He questioned Palmer's involvement with dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that Musk has continually promoted. Musk's support for the meme coin on Twitter has repeatedly helped buoy the coin's value. Tesla and SpaceX have even begun accepting dogecoin as payment for some of its merchandise.
"Palmer always forgets to mention that he never wrote a single line of Dogecoin code," Musk tweeted.
In a since deleted tweet, Palmer called for his fellow dogecoin cocreator,
"The people after us did exponentially more than either jackson or i did on the code base," Markus wrote on Twitter. "I think i wrote like 20 lines of code and copied the rest."
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2022
Neither Palmer nor Markus work on dogecoin anymore. The two started the cryptocurrency as a joke in 2013.
Markus, a former IBM software engineer, and Palmer, an Adobe software engineer, hadn't even met when they created the meme token. Palmer tweeted about investing in "dogecoin" as a joke and bought the domain name dogecoin.com. Markus stumbled upon the site and got in contact with Palmer regarding his own efforts to program a digital currency that could appeal to larger demographics.
The two engineers launched dogecoin within the year. The cryptocurrency is now one of the most valuable digital coins.
Palmer is not the first person to draw Musk's ire. In recent months, the Tesla CEO has engaged in Twitter spats with the head of Russia's space agency and the Biden administration.