Elon Musk Just Dropped His Take on Bitcoin's Real Creator—And It's Not Who You Think

Satoshi Nakamoto remains crypto’s biggest mystery. For 16 years, nobody knows who actually wrote that white paper. But now Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is throwing his guess into the ring: Nick Szabo.

During a recent podcast, Musk said Szabo “seems to be probably more than anyone else responsible for the evolution of those ideas.” Here’s the thing—Szabo has denied it multiple times. “I’m used to it,” he said back in 2014 when researchers made similar claims.

Why the speculation?

The evidence is actually pretty wild:

• Aston University ran a linguistic analysis on Bitcoin’s white paper and found striking similarities to Szabo’s writing style
• Both use LaTeX for document formatting (rare choice)
• Phrases in the white paper show up in Szabo’s earlier publications
• Szabo literally created BitGold in 1998—basically Bitcoin’s prototype before Bitcoin even existed

But here’s the kicker: Szabo founded “smart contracts” concept and BitGold, yet never claimed to be Nakamoto. Even Musk admitted “I don’t know who created Bitcoin.”

Why stay anonymous?

Most theories point to decentralization. Think about it—if Satoshi reveals himself, Bitcoin becomes centralized around one person’s influence. That defeats the whole purpose. Vitalik Buterin learned this the hard way with Ethereum; he actively tried to reduce his own influence.

Szabo’s got 300K Twitter followers and stays in the crypto space anyway. The real question: Would revealing yourself as Satoshi even matter at this point?

What do you think—is it really Szabo, or is anonymity just the best feature crypto ever had?