Twitter Wars – Dogefather Elon Musk Tussles With Dogecoin Co-Founder Jackson Palmer

• Elon Musk was embroiled in a war of words with Dogecoin’s co-founder over their abilities.
• At the center of the storm was Elon Musk saying that the Dogecoin creator had the coding skills of a 12-year-old.
• Despite the row, Musk has been one of the biggest supporters of Dogecoin and was instrumental in the token reaching new highs.

Jackson Palmer, the co-founder of Dogecoin, claimed that Elon Musk did not know the basics of coding, sparking a Twitter war between the duo.

The messy spat

Palmer, in an interview with Australian media Crickey, shared his thoughts about the cryptocurrency industry early in the week. He famously declared that the industry attracts “shark-like scammers and opportunists” and went ahead to replay a meeting he had with Tesla’s boss, Elon Musk.

According to Palmer, he shared a program to report bot accounts on Twitter automatically with Musk. However, Palmer claims that Elon Musk was unable to run the code for the script pointing to his less-than-average technical skills.

“He’s just really good at pretending he knows,” said Palmer. “That’s very evident with the Tesla full -self-driving promise.”

Musk retorted to Palmer’s claim with the billionaire saying that the script failed to report bots and was a “lame snippet of python.” He went ahead to refer to Palmer as a “tool”  and asked him to share the script with the world if it were so good.

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

In response, Palmer dropped a Github link to his anti-bot script as proof that his code worked. He argued that he had an email thread with Jack Dorsey in 2018 and they stated that they were working on something similar to his script.

“I never said it was super complex but this simple script definitely worked in catching and reporting the less sophisticated phishing accounts circa 2018,” said Palmer. “They’ve since evolved their tactics. I’ve shared it with a lot of people and it worked for them.”

Billy Markus wades in to douse the tensions

As words were exchanged, Billy Markus, co-founder of Dogecoin stepped in between the warring duo to downplay the conflict. He stated that building Dogecoin did not require the best coding skills because it was created as a joke to lampoon the wider crypto space that was gaining popularity in 2013.

“The people after us did exponentially more than either Jackson or I did on the code base,” said Markus. “I think I wrote like 20 lines of code and copied the rest.”

Musk appreciated the light-heartedness of Markus and referred to the co-founder as being “humble”.

“Billy’s sense of humor & irreverence is a big part of why people love Dogecoin,” said Musk.

Markus and Palmer are no longer a part of the project but they maintain a strong presence in the space and regularly share their opinions on matters in the industry. Musk has played a key role in Dogecoin’s rise to fame with the billionaire posting memes around the network and even appearing on Saturday Night Live to “promote” the cryptocurrency.