Dogecoin Co-Creator Calls Elon Musk a ‘Grifter’ Who Can’t Run Basic Code, Tesla CEO Hits Right Back

Australian co-creator of Dogecoin, Jackson Palmer has hit out at big-time DOGE fan Elon Musk in an interview, explicitly calling Musk a “grifter” who sells a vision of the future that he hopes to deliver one day. Palmer goes on to say that Musk doesn’t understand basic coding principles while alluding to an interaction the two had years ago when Palmer had apparently shared an excerpt of a python script he’d written that claimed to remove bots from Twitter. Musk hit back at Palmer on Twitter stating, “My kids wrote better code when they were 12.”

Speaking about his first interaction with the Tesla CEO in 2018, Palmer told news outlet Crikey that Musk was complaining about Twitter bots that were pushing cryptocurrency scams in the replies to his tweets. At the time, Palmer offered to share a snippet of code that would help fix the problem for him. Palmer said at the time, “Elon has the script… we had a good chat on how @jack and the Twitter team should definitely automate and fix this problem on their end though.”

Fast-forward to today and it’s certainly an even more relevant issue for Musk, who is in the process of buying Twitter — and would have the ability to actually make changes and attempt to fix such issues.

Palmer accounts in his interview that Musk had reached out to get hold of the script but claimed the billionaire’s technical knowledge was so deficient that he didn’t know how to run it.

“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.”

Adding to the fire, Palmer recounted a year ago calling the SpaceX founder a “grifter” who “sells a vision in hopes that he can one day deliver what he’s promising, but he doesn’t know that.”

Musk, clearly infuriated by Palmer’s comments, fired back on Tuesday on Twitter. He suggested Palmer’s code could not deliver on its promise of addressing the Twitter bot problem, adding “My kids wrote better code when they were 12.”

“You falsely claimed ur lame snippet of Python gets rid of bots. Ok buddy, then share it with the world …”

He challenged Palmer to make the script public, which would open it to greater scrutiny. Palmer took the opportunity to share the code, which he posted on GitHub four years ago.