Elon Musk Denies He’s Bitcoin’s Creator

Tesla’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, may be a lot of things, but he denies that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of bitcoin. What’s more, the outspoken technology executive says he doesn’t even remember where he keeps his digital currency.

In a tweet Tuesday (Nov. 28) covered by Bloomberg, Musk said: “Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.” Musk was responding to a blog post making the rounds on cryptocurrency websites that implies he is the creator of bitcoin.

The Medium blog post argues that Musk has the technical expertise to create it. Author Sahil Gupta said, “If Elon is Satoshi, it seems like this knowledge would become public at some point anyway. But if it were public now, Elon could offer guidance as the currency’s ‘founding father.'”

The comments from Musk come as bitcoin is close to hitting the $10,000 mark for the first time. It was trading at around $1,000 at the start of the year. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous author of the research paper that conceived bitcoin roughly nine years ago, remains anonymous.

On Monday (Nov. 27), the price of bitcoin made it up above $9,500, which means the cryptocurrency is up 900 percent in 2017, an acceleration that has increased in the last month. And the price kept on climbing past $9,500 — as of mid-morning in New York yesterday, bitcoin rose as high as $9,732.

Bitcoin first broke the $9,000 milestone over the weekend — just about a week after it reached its previous high-water mark of $8,000. That is the fastest $1,000 jump in bitcoin value in its brief history; it took eight days for it to go from $3,000 to $4,000, and needed nine days to go from $5,000 to $6,000.