Elon Musk reads Crikey, continues to embarrass himself online

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, continues to burnish his reputation of having the world’s thinnest skin as he lashes out at Crikey reporting about his lack of technical ability.

Earlier this week, Crikey published a wide-ranging interview with the Australian co-creator of Dogecoin, Jackson Palmer, talking about cryptocurrency, grifting, Clive Palmer and… Elon Musk.

Palmer recounted an interaction he had with Musk that showed the billionaire businessman lacked basic coding skills.

“I gave it to other crypto influencers,” Palmer said. “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. He asked, ‘How do I run this Python script?'” 

(Python is one of the world’s most popular coding languages. Running some code written in Python — known as a script — is a very basic task that any person with basic technical capacity can do on a standard desktop computer.)

Despite ostensibly running a handful of companies and being in the midst of a maelstrom over sexual misconduct accusations, Musk responded to Palmer’s claims, which he presumably came across during his routine consumption of Crikey.

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

Palmer quickly responded that he had in fact made this script public back in 2018. That didn’t deter the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive officer from continuing to mouth off about Palmer, calling him a “tool” and claiming that his children could write better code.

The claim that Elon Musk couldn’t complete a basic programming task clashes with his carefully crafted public image as a visionary, hands-on technocrat. He’s also been a big booster of Palmer’s Dogecoin in the past. 

Despite his involvement in the creation of the memecoin-turned-top-cryptocurrency, Palmer has denounced cryptocurrency.