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Elon Musk Knows How To Make Money, But He Didn't Invent Bitcoin

Elon Musk Knows How To Make Money, But He Didn't Invent Bitcoin

One of the great rumours of the tech world is that the SpaceX CEO is secretly Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive founder of the cryptocurrency

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie

Elon Musk is a man who can make money out of just about anything. He made his fortune by creating PayPal, he owns Tesla and SpaceX - he even made $300,000 (£224,300) selling hats bearing the (terribly punned) name of his rock-boring company ('The Boring Company'. I'm afraid so). It's almost as if the man can create cash from thin air.

Well...he can't. The man confirmed it himself. If you don't know what this is all about, then you've missed one of the great rumours of the tech world in recent years: that Musk is secretly Satoshi Nakamoto, the cryptocurrency's mysterious and elusive founder.

An ex-employee of SpaceX - Musk's space exploration company - recently made the claim in an article posted on Medium, stating a startling sequence of coincidences that he said made it likely that his former boss was the brains behind the whole thing.

Elon Musk
Elon Musk

Credit: PA

His logic was decent: "The 2008 Bitcoin paper was written by someone with a deep understanding of economics and cryptography," said Sahil Gupta, the employee in question, referring to the foundational document of the cryptocurrency.

"Elon has a background in econ and wrote production-level internet software for Zip2 and X.com/Paypal." It does stand to reason that a man like Musk, who invented one of the major methods of online currency transfer in the world, might know more than most about online currencies.

Gupta backs it up further, citing Musk's expertise in a coding language that provided the basis for everything on Bitcoin: "Bitcoin's source code was written by someone with a mastery of C++. Elon seems to have a firm grasp of C++, insisting it be used at X.com and at SpaceX."

via GIPHY

"Experience aside, Elon is a self-taught polymath. He's repeatedly innovated across fields by reading books on a subject and applying the knowledge. It's how he built rockets, invented the Hyperloop (which he released to the world as a paper), and could have invented Bitcoin," concluded Gupta.

So is it true? Could one of the biggest mouths in tech have kept such a huge secret to himself all this time? Well, no. Musk isn't Satoshi.

Earlier today, he tweeted: "Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don't know where it is." Doesn't own a single Bitcoin, so it's probably quite unlikely that he's the founder of it.

Unless it's all a massive ruse to guard the estimated 10 million Bitcoin that Satoshi is meant to be sitting on. Umm... are we sure this isn't an elaborate double bluff...?

Words: Mike Meehall Wood

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: Billionaire, Bitcoin, tesla, elon musk, World News, SpaceX, Cryptocurrency, currency