Elon Musk savages Aussie Dogecoin creator after scathing criticism

In late 2013, Australian entrepreneur Jackson Palmer, from NSW’s Central Coast, created dogecoin with US software engineer Billy Markus.

It was intended as a joke to make fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. They used a Japanese dog, a shiba inu, as a mascot for their coin.

But the punchline was lost, with investors taking the meme currency seriously. At time of writing, doge was ranked in the top 10 cryptocurrencies with a market capitalisation of $US11.4 billion ($A15.9 billion).

And it is Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk who has largely been credited for the coin’s meteoric rise. Indeed, by spruiking dogecoin on Twitter — at times increasing its price by as much as 20 per cent — the world’s richest person has earnt himself the nickname the ‘dogefather’.

However, in an interview this week, Mr Palmer labelled Musk a “grifter” and said he knows much less about coding than he appears to know.

“He sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that,” Mr Palmer told Aussie publication Crikey in a sit-down interview. “He’s just really good at pretending he knows. That’s very evident with the Tesla full-self-driving promise,” he said.

“About a year ago when Musk was saying something about crypto, I said Elon Musk was and always will be a grifter – but the world loves grifters. They love the idea that they may also be a billionaire one day, and that’s the dream he’s selling,” Mr Palmer said.

“My opinion on him and all billionaires is that I don’t care much for them.”

Mr Palmer also said Musk didn’t know how to run basic code.

He described his first interaction with the Tesla founder several years ago, after he wrote a code script that would scrape Twitter and automatically detect cryptocurrency scams.

Hoping to reach thousands of people to stop them being scammed, he gave the code to crypto influencers, including Mr Musk.

“It became apparent very quickly that [Musk] didn’t understand coding as well as he made out,” Mr Palmer said.

“He asked, ‘How do I run this Python [programming language] script?’

“I wasn’t a fan of him [after that].”

Mr Musk has since hit out after Mr Palmer’s comments were widely published, calling the Aussie “a tool”.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Mr Musk wrote: “You falsely claimed [your] lame snippet of Python gets rid of bots.

“OK buddy, then share it with the world.

“My kids wrote better code when they were 12 than the nonsense script Jackson sent me.

“Like I said, if it’s so great, he should share it with the world and make everyone’s experience with Twitter better. If he does, you will see what I mean. Jackson Palmer is a tool.”

In a subsequent tweet, he added: “And Palmer always forgets to mention that he never wrote a single line of Dogecoin code.”