Fighting Words: Dogecoin Co-Founder Calls Elon Musk A Grifter

It seems as if Jackson Palmer, one of the co-founders of Dogecoin DOGE/USD, and Tesla Inc TSLA tycoon Elon Musk could have a somewhat contentious past.

What happened: Palmer was interviewed by the Australian media website Cricket.com.au on Monday when he was asked if he had been paying attention to Musk’s Twitter Inc TWTR takeover — and, his answer was somewhat shocking.

“Ah, it’s funny, I have an interesting past with Elon. The first time I messaged him on Twitter years ago, I had written a bot, a script that would automatically detect if there was a cryptocurrency scam in your Twitter mentions and would automatically report them to the platform,” he continued “Elon reached out to me to get hold of that script and it became apparent very quickly that he didn’t understand coding as well as he made out. He asked, “How do I run this Python script?”

“After I gave him the script, I wasn’t a fan of him. He’s a grifter, he sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that. He’s just really good at pretending he knows. That’s very evident with the Tesla full-self-driving promise.”

Why it matters: Musk has been a vocal proponent of Dogecoin and its utility alongside Billy Markus, who is the other half of the memecoin founding team. Most recently, Musk announced Dogecoin will be used to purchase merchandise from his space exploration company SpaceX and can already be used to buy merchandise from Tesla.

Palmer left the cryptocurrency space in 2015, citing a toxic culture.

"All in all, the cryptocurrency space increasingly feels like a bunch of white libertarian bros sitting around hoping to get rich and coming up with half-baked, buzzword-filled business ideas which often fail in an effort to try and do so." He told Coindesk in 2015.

Coincidentally, Jared Birchall, who is Musk's right-hand man, is a legal and financial advisor for the Dogecoin Foundation. According to a TechStory article, Musk had denied his own direct link to the foundation. Palmer is not part of the foundation.

Photo: BortN66 via Shutterstock