On Nov. 5, 2026, an X user writing under the pseudonym yellow proposed that Elon Musk could be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto after using Grok and stylometry to compare their writing. The author said the linguistic similarities were unexpected but did not prove Musk created the first cryptocurrency.

In the X post, yellow said the analysis compared Nakamoto’s writing with that of 65 well-known members of the Bitcoin community and covered 2.4 million words.

Arguments cited in the theory

The author pointed to X.com, the payments company Musk founded in 1999. It merged with Confinity in 2000 and became part of PayPal. According to PayPal co-founder Luke Nosek, the team had initially sought to create a global currency free from the influence of banks and governments.

“We never achieved the mission,” Nosek said at the World Economic Forum in 2019. He said PayPal instead became too centralized and dependent on major financial institutions.

The theory suggests that this unfinished goal could have influenced Musk’s later work. The author highlighted 2008, when Tesla and SpaceX faced serious financial difficulties amid a global economic crisis. Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper that year and later included a newspaper headline about another bank bailout program in Bitcoin’s first block.

The author also cited Musk’s technical background. Musk has said he has experience with C++, assembly and hardware, while Bitcoin was written in C++. Researcher Robert Graham has described Nakamoto’s code as the work of a programmer experienced in developing software for Windows and Unix.

Stylometry produced no conclusive match

The stylometric comparison examined characteristic language habits. It used about 62,000 words from Nakamoto’s emails and messages, along with Musk’s X posts, Tesla materials and other publicly available texts. Cryptographers, early Bitcoin developers and other prominent community members formed the control group.

The author identified several similarities. Nakamoto and Musk both used the phrase “order of magnitude” regularly and used “bloody,” an expression associated with British English. Double spaces after periods appeared in 95.3% of Nakamoto’s texts. British spelling accounted for about 33% of his variants, compared with 13% among other writers on cryptography mailing lists.

However, the Burrows’ Delta comparison did not identify an author. Musk’s X texts scored 1.04, compared with 1.32 for Nick Szabo and 1.13 for Adam Back. The researcher said differences between social-media posts, emails and forum messages made comparisons difficult, and none of the candidates matched Nakamoto closely enough to confirm authorship.

The theory also cited Musk’s jokes about Nakamoto’s identity, his Bitcoin posts, the X.com name and the name of his son, X Æ A-12. The author acknowledged that each could be a coincidence or a joke. A possible overlap between Musk’s and Nakamoto’s whereabouts in the Los Angeles area in January 2009 also did not establish Nakamoto’s identity.

Musk denied in 2017 that he was Nakamoto. He said an acquaintance had given him some bitcoin several years earlier but that he did not know where it was.

The study’s author said stylometry could neither confirm nor refute Musk’s involvement. The only convincing evidence would be a cryptographically signed transaction from addresses associated with early Bitcoin mining.

Earlier attempts to identify Nakamoto

Journalists, researchers and documentary filmmakers have repeatedly proposed candidates for Nakamoto, but none of the theories has gained broad acceptance. The HBO film “Digital Money: The Bitcoin Mystery” (“Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery”), which premiered on Oct. 9, 2024, identified Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd as the likely Nakamoto, a claim Todd denied.

Director Cullen Hoback had previously said the film would reveal Bitcoin’s creator. Len Sassaman was also named among the possible candidates before its release. In April 2026, the documentary “Finding Satoshi” advanced another hypothesis: that the pseudonym probably belonged to a duo rather than one person.

Source: Incrypted